The next time you’re thinking of posting your boarding pass along with a selfie over social media or even throwing it away in a garbage, you might want to consider putting it into a document shredder instead. The two-dimensional barcodes and QR codes found on many boarding passes these days can potentially hold a great deal of information and depending on the airlines may allow someone to discover more about you.
One must keep in mind that anything you post online, whether it’s just to your friends through social media really has the potential to be viewed by anyone – and that includes hackers looking to find their next person to target. So based on recent security reports some security firms were able to determine that the innocent looking lines and fuzzy pixels of the bar code found on your boarding pass actually could contain a treasure trove of passenger information that could easily be exploited by shady characters who want access to your accounts.
With that in mind, using a free online barcode reader, which can be found easily on the Internet, a person can take a clip of your boarding pass barcode, upload it and uncover your name, email address, phone number, a list of your current and future flights, frequent-flier number, flight information, and the details of the emergency contacts you’d added to the reservation; all of which can be used to access your frequent flyer account and take effective control of it.
According to security research reports, the information is also enough to make it easier for an attacker to reset the PIN number used to secure your frequent flyer account where they could then potentially cancel future flights and also get a lot of the info needed to do a PIN or password reset and take control of your account with the airline.
The real lesson here is that given a little bit of information about you,(a board pass in this example) it’s generally possible to gather a lot more information either through social engineering or even through a bit of Internet searching, especially if you are posting personal information onto your social media account.
I’d make a conscience effort not to leave your boarding pass anywhere other people can get access to it. If you can, take that boarding pass home with you, tear or cut it up or put it in the shredder. Or better yet, use a mobile boarding pass, which could be won’t leave a paper trail. But if you really want to post your boarding pass online so as to brag to your friends about your next exotic vacation, you might want to blur or block out the barcode on the boarding pass first before you post it.
The dangers of being careless with your boarding pass
