Online Traveling Site Ixigo isn’t the only company to face Data Breach

Key Highlights

Underway investigation of allegations for user data breach

18 million records from the online traveling site were stolen

EarlySalary, Zomato, and FreshMenu have also faced data breach cases.

Ixigo aggregates and compares on-spot travel information, prices and availability of flights, trains, buses, cabs, hotels, packages, and destinations. After Amadeus, he started pursuing his business studies at INSEAD’s Asia campus Singapore. After coming back to India, Bajpai met his then classmate Kumar (Co-founder) and they both decided to start Ixigo, a travel search engine website.

The travel marketing company is currently under an investigation of allegations for user data breach and maintains that. Based on the investigation, there is no evidence of proving these allegations or decisive enough to confirm that it happened.

Related : Ixigo Announces New Subsidiary Venture ‘Travenues’ To Bring New Tech for the Airline Industry

According to a report, 18 million records from the online travelling site were stolen by a hacker as part of 127 million records it stole from eight different websites. It was first reported by a British news website the Register. Information such as users name, email addresses, passwords were leaked. Ixigo used an old and frail MD5 hashing algorithm to scramble passwords, which hackers can unscramble without much effort.

Aloke Bajpai said, “The investigation is underway and the alleged breach has not been confirmed yet. We do not store payment, cards or any type of financial data of our customers. We encrypt and hash our passwords with a directional hashing algorithm.”

Ixigo also claims to have taken some pre-emptive security measures, such as two-factor authentication; and as reset passwords and security tokens o its customers.

Based on the data of Data Security Council of India(DSCI), India has been the second most cyberattacks affected the country between the period of 2016 and 2018. The average cost for a data breach in the country has increased by 7.9% since 2017, with the average cost per breached record scaling to $64 (INR 4,552).

Related : Ixigo Trains is the World’s 6th Most Downloaded Travel Application

In February, Aadhaar details of more than 6.7 million citizens were leaked on Indane’s website. French cybersecurity Baptiste Robert had last year shared website links containing the Aadhaar data of millions of Indian citizens.

The increasing cyber-attacks have turned out in more and more companies selecting for cyber insurance policies to alleviate the cyber-breach risk. About 350 cyber insurance policies have been sold in India till 2018, which is a 40% boost from that in 2017.

Indian startups including the Pune-based salary advance application EarlySalary, online food delivery and restaurant discovery application Zomato, food-tech cloud kitchen startup FreshMenu, and also Ixigo have also encountered data breach cases.

Recently, Ixigo released a virtual travel currency and e-wallet for its users ‘Ixigo Money’. It works simple, first users have to sign up to Ixigo.com and create an account. Ixigo money helps you to earn points over every deal you make, and it gets credited to your account directly.