Researchers Found Issues With the Airportr Website

Getting luggage to the airport can be a challenge, especially if you’re heading there from work. Making the process of getting your bags there (and delivering them to your home or hotel) relatively easy is the premise behind Airportr, a service available at a number of airports in Europe that’s received glowing coverage from The New York Times. And Airportr seems to be expanding: Earlier this year, Lufthansa announced a partnership with the service.

To make something like Airportr work, you’d need to collect a lot of data from users — where they live and work and where and when they’re traveling, for starters. Presumably, the company would have ways of keeping that data secure, which makes a recent report from Andy Greenberg at WIRED that much more unsettling.

As Greenberg writes, the cyber security firm CyberX9 detected security flaws in Airportr’s site and then used them to access user data. But the issues go deeper than that. According to WIRED‘s reporting, CyberX9 also found a way to gain access to the point where they could have re-routed luggage. When you factor in the apparent popularity of the service among diplomats, you have the makings of an even bigger security issue on your hands.

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The good news is that CyberX9 are not malicious actors and instead alerted Airportr to the issues. According to WIRED, the company has taken steps to address the vulnerabilities the security firm discovered. But Greenberg points out another cause for concern: There isn’t a way of knowing whether hackers accessed any of the same data before the security issue was resolved. There are many apps out there that promise to make your trip easier, but it’s worth looking into whether they’re also taking care of your sensitive data.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…