The boarding pass is a document provided by an airline during check-in, it permits the passenger to embark the aircraft.
On the photo above it includes passenger’s information such as the name, flight number and date and scheduled time for departure.
Once you’ve used the boarding pass and boarded the aircraft. You knew that the boarding pass served its purpose. Most of us disregard it after we landed to our next destination.
That piece of paper is being targetted by an identity theft or a hacker. Now you are thinking what would they gain in that piece of paper?
Security Guru Brian Kreb, author of more than 1,300 blog posts about security fix. According to him, there was an avid follower of security fix blog who posted how to get information about your boarding pass.
He now started investigating and found out that there is a website that can decode the boarding pass barcode.
Although it was the follower who tried to use the last name on the boarding pass. Afterwards, he goes to the airline’s website and accesses the passenger information where he was able to obtain the passenger entire account.
We listed 4 reasons why you need to stop posting your boarding pass on Social Media.
1) You just gave access to your personal information such as full name and your booking reference. This is all an attacker needs to log into your flight details and could revise your reservations online.
2) You just provided access to your location same with the time that you’ll be in these places. They can now view your future flight plans with that specific airline. An identity thief can definitely use your account information.
3) Logging into your online booking will not only reveals flight details. In some cases, it also shows your ID number, passport number, email address, mobile number and apparently your credit card details.
4) Again even you blurred out your name on the photo. It still shows the bar-code then an easy bar-code scan on a free decoder on the internet can reveal your frequent flyer number, which can be used by other people to book flights.
“The next time you’re thinking of throwing away a used boarding pass with a barcode on it, consider tossing the boarding pass into a document shredder instead.” – Brian Kreb’s advice.