Asiana Airlines website hacked
Asiana webpage after being hacked. / Screen captured from Asiana homepage
By Jung Min-ho
The website of Asiana Airlines briefly went offline Monday due to cyberattacks from overseas, inconveniencing many customers.
According to the company, cyber vandals attacked its external web server at 4:35 a.m., publishing a hateful message toward Albanians.
“I am sorry, Asiana Airlines, but the world needs to understand the crime against humanity, carried out by Albanian pigs touching Serbia,” the message read.
“War is useless, I always love to see a world full of peace and love, but when I see such horror as what happened to Serbia, Myself recognizes that it is impossible to keep the world in peace, anger comes.”
The hackers, who called themselves “Kuroi SH and Prosox,” claimed Serbians have been persecuted, harmed, raped and killed by Albanians.
Asiana said it started to fix the problem at 5:38 a.m. By noon, the website appeared to have been fully restored.
Until then, many customers trying to book flights or check their flight schedules on the website suffered inconveniences.
“Based on the message that appeared after the attacks, we believe the hackers wanted to spread their message rather than attack our website,” the company said in a statement.
Asiana also said it has not detected any customer data leaks on its server, saying the attacks only affected the server of a contracted firm that manages its domain name system, which is a database that contains the names and IP addresses of various hosts on the internet.
“No problems in our internal web server or homepage data have been found,” Asiana said.
“We immediately reported the attacks to the Korea Internet and Security Agency and now the website is working and accessible from computers and mobile phones.”
Although the latest cyberattacks against Asiana seem to have left no serious damage to the company’s website, its failure to prevent them raised concerns over its online security capabilities.
Last year, Asiana apologized after sensitive customer data was revealed to be unsecured, including passport information, citizen resident numbers, home addresses, phone numbers, family relations records and bank account details. The company blamed the problem on a system error.
Victims were Koreans and foreigners who traveled or planned to travel using Asiana or its affiliated airlines, such as United Airlines, Lufthansa, Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines, among others.