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Other Flying Hazards to Worry About This Summer
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| Written by Mel Duvall |
Dramatic pictures seen in recent days of a car-sized hole in the fuselage of a Qantas jet are no doubt causing nervous flyers to grip their arm rests extra tight as they head off on summer vacations.
Such incidents are indeed rare, and Qantas has an admirable safety record. So those with a fear-of-flying shouldn’t worry too much about this incident.
Instead, you can wring your hands over these flying hazards.
Several airlines have warned customers this week to be on guard against bogus emails which claim to be invoices for airline tickets, but instead contain malware.
The airlines which have sent out the warnings, including Delta and Northwest, are urging customers not to open the emails and delete them immediately.
Internet security firm McAfee reported that the emails usually contain a subject heading such as “Online Order for Flight Ticket”. The emails thank the recipient for purchasing a ticket on the airline’s site and say the owner’s credit card has been charged an amount in the $400 range. It claims an attachment contains the electronic invoice for the purchase, but when the recipient opens the attachment, it downloads a Trojan horse that steals information, including keystrokes.
McAfee urges people to use safe computing practices to combat such attacks, including never opening unexpected email attachments.
North of the border there is an even more troubling incident involving airline travel and computer security. The Canadian government has initiated a probe into concerns that self-service ticket kiosks at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport may have been compromised and credit card information stolen.
The probe was initiated after credit card company Visa spotted patterns of fraud on cards of people who traveled through the airport. While the source of the fraud has not yet been pinpointed, investigations are focusing on the 150 self-service kiosks at the airport which customers use to obtain boarding passes for flights. One airline, WestJet, took the decision to stop customers from using credit cards at kiosks across Canada while the investigation was ongoing.
The self-serve kiosks at Toronto are owned by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, but the information network is managed by technology firms ARINC Inc. of Annapolis, Md., and SITA Inc. of Geneva, Switzerland.
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