One of my favorite air traffic tracking sites and flight tracking sites, Flightradar24.com, got hacked last week. I received an email about the data breach yesterday which states that users who registered prior to March 16, 2016, were affected.
The breach affected only one server and this one was shut down promptly after the breach got detected. According to the official email from Flightradar24 only email addresses and hashed passwords of the before mentioned subset of users were affected. Flightradar24 doesn’t store the passwords in plain text and therefore it makes it a bit harder to decrypt your passwords.
As a security reason, Flightradar24 has forced all users who might have been affected to reset their password before you can use your account again.
The notification email I received already included a personalized link to reset my password. However, I will rather be safe than sorry and accessed Flightradar24.com directly and made the changes there. As emails can be spoofed too easily, but the email was legit.
Flightradar24 purchased Flightdiary.com and it became now my.Flightradar24.com. A site to track your flights and generate statistics about miles flown, favorite routes and so on. This is one of my favorite flight tracking sites. This site was also affected as it uses the same accounts for access.
Please make sure to change your passwords soon and if you used the same password somewhere else, I highly recommend you change those passwords as well.
I can only express again, to never use the same password on multiple sites. There are just too many threads out there.
Was anyone of you guy affected by that breach? Let me know in the comments.
Peter has a passion for Traveling, Photography, and Geocaching. These are the best ingredients for amazing adventures all over the globe. “Traveling is fun, no matter if you stay in a luxury hotel or travel like a backpacker.” Peter shares his experiences on his Blog www.gatetoadventures.com
Some of Peter’s photos are published on corporate websites, in-flight magazines, travel guides, and much more.