Accountable or Anonymous?

4 min readFeb 8, 2021

AND THE QUESTION IS?

Who’s tired of every sovereign state entity, local municipality, regular search engine, and favorite social media knowing precisely who you are, where you are, and postulating what your next need? Oh wow, everybody in the audience, we see the hands. The exception is the guy in the back on his personal tracking device who missed the question.

It is well understood that after 9/11, authorities mandated the check and verification of the identity of travelers to prevent a repeat. If you travel, you are required to book travel, pay with a credit card (no cash or bitcoin folks), produce identification during initial access, and then produce identification again before boarding. The argument; We’re all safer that way. Really?

How about the newest Chinese hack on travelers? They are gathering passenger details from airlines across the world to track high-value targets’ movements. A few snippets from the ZDNet article: http://zd.net/3qJmHtc

A suspected Chinese hacking group has been attacking the airline industry for the past few years with the goal of obtaining passenger data in order to track the movement of persons of interest.

Today’s security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now be millions — or even billions — of dollars at risk when information security isn’t handled properly.

The intrusions have been linked to a threat actor that the cyber-security has been tracking under the name of Chimera.

TRACKING TARGETS OF INTEREST

While the NCC and Fox-IT report didn’t speculate why the hackers targeted the airline industry and why they stole passenger data, this is pretty obvious.

In fact, it is very common for state-sponsored hacking groups to target airline companies, hotel chains, and telcos to obtain data they could use to track the movements and communications of persons of interest.