It is getting scarier by the day as newer names are being added to the list of companies whose sensitive data’s been hacked. Security breaches aren’t a new thing in cyber world; however, with the latest revelations that have come to the fore, every single hack is now putting at threat the crucial data of millions of people in one go. The Sabre Corp. hack is perhaps the newest one to have hit us and this one too is putting personal information of millions of users at threat, like all the previous ones.

The bigger revelation in this is however the masterminds of the attack – speculations are rife that once again it is China-linked hackers that are behind this breach.

As per the latest reports, data from the internal systems of American Airlines and Sabre Corp. has been hacked. This has triggered the same wave of fear that was among the masses, not very long ago, when the highly-protected databases of Anthem and the Office of Personnel Management were breached.

While American Airlines is one of the biggest carriers plying between several important North American destinations, Sabre Corp. processes flight and hotel reservations for several major companies. As is pretty evident, both the companies maintain detailed databases of their customers including lots of crucial information that can be easily manipulated by the hackers or used to research on further. The data can be used to blackmail US officials or to trail the travel movements of the officials to understand their operations or worse still, the details can be used to build fake profiles with real information.

Irrespective of the way the data is used, the entire incident is quite frightening. In an official statement that Sabre Corp. issued, it mentioned that, “At this time, we are not aware that this incident has compromised sensitive protected information, such as credit card data or personally identifiable information, but our investigation is ongoing.” However, Casey Norton, spokesman American Airlines shared that “American has worked with outside cyber security experts who checked digital signatures, IP addresses and the style of attack, and there’s no evidence to suggest a breach similar to that experienced by the US Office of Personnel Management…”

So, while the investigation is on, it is too early yet to comment on the perpetrators or the level of threat that is there to the leaked data – nonetheless, what we can still understand is that presently, cyber security is in a very dangerous zone. What we share online as a user is very much prone to getting stolen, irrespective of the platform we are sharing it on…