Ryanair Shrugs Off Discovery That Others Can Edit Your Flight Booking; Says It's Your Problem
from the oh-really-now? dept
European discount airline Ryanair is somewhat famous for their near total lack of concern about customer happiness. The airline, at times, seems almost gleeful about the complaints it gets from customers. Still, it seems to go pretty far to
completely shrug off a security hole that allows others to edit your bookings (found via
Glyn Moody). Basically, some researchers discovered that if you know someone's email address and the date (and locations) that they're planning to fly, you can access their account and even adjust and manipulate the bookings. That's because the site apparently does not use passwords, but just those bits of information. What's really stunning is Ryanair's response:
"Your 'experts' are talking complete rubbish. If someone's lunatic ex-partner wants to access a flight booking and pay for priority boarding or extra baggage for the person they just split up from then they all have a lot more to worry about than a simple amended flight booking. It is everyone's individual responsibility to keep their personal information personal."
That's from Ryanair spokesman Daniel de Carvalho. Anyone taking bets on how long until someone changes one of de Carvalho's own flight bookings?
Filed Under: booking, hacking, passwords
Companies: ryanair
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New Horizons...
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Ryanair are only compounding their image as a company with no concern or respect for their customers. Hardly a winning approach to doing business!
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Their rule is - when our tickets are �1 a flight - you pay what you get for so why should you be surprised if it goes wrong. Michael O'Leary said he would charge you �1 to use the toilet if he thought you could get away with it. He already charges all passengers a "wheelchair fee" because EU law says he isn't allowed to charge wheelchair users this directly.
He's lovely. Like a case of herpes.
I think this website can say an awful lot more than i can about ryanair = http://www.ihateryanair.org/.
Frankly, i'm not surprised by this story but i long ago realised using Ryanair was a false economy.
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I bet he flys on the corp. jet and will never have that problem.
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"And then I get a part of the settlement, right?"
"Errr...."
"Well, do I at least get refunded for the ruined tickets?"
"Ummm....."
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I'm pretty sure you just dared the hacker community to open a can of pwnsauce on your sh1t airline.
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Duh. It's Ryanair.
This isn't a massive security hole. This would still take a fair bit of effort. And the kinds of people important enough to target with something like this are not the kinds of people who will be flying Ryanair. Yes, your crazy ex might screw with your flights...but I'm sure they could find a way to do that on any airline, this just makes it easier. What do you want for that price?
Seriously, this is a company whose sole goal is to charge the absolute least amount possible. Which means they're going for the customers who either don't care about service or can't afford anything better. You expect them to spend the money to fix some tiny little security hole, that won't matter to 99% of their customers?
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