Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #543

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Bengaluru Man Hacks IndiGo's Website To Find His Lost Luggage. Airline Responds
The wait one has to endure while collecting their luggage from the conveyer belt after a flight is extremely time- consuming and frustrating. But the situation worsens when one simply can’t locate their lug- gage after a long time of waiting.
A similar thing happened with Nandan Kumar, a software engineer
travelling from Patna to Bangalore on an IndiGo flight. Kumar’s luggage was mistakenly picked up by a co-passenger and the incident snow- balled into a larg- er scenario that prompted Kumar to use his devel- oper skills for good.
Kumar shared his story of retrieving his luggage and simultaneously
pointed out the flaws in the secu- rity of the IndiGo website.
“So, I travelled from PAT - BLR from indigo 6E- 185 yesterday. And my bag got exchanged with another passen- ger. Honest mis- take from both our ends. As the bags were exactly the same with some minor differ- ences,” Kumar wrote in the
tweet.
He then went on to specify that he called the cus- tomer care num- ber and followed all protocols to locate his lost lug- gage.
Now, the story gets interesting. “Long story short I couldn’t get any resolution on the issue. And neither your customer care team was ready to provide
me with the con- tact details of the person, citing pri- vacy and data protection,” Kumar men- tioned. However, he didn’t receive any call from any customer care agent even the next day.
After many failed attempts at trying to locate the co- passenger, Kumar decided to pull out the big guns. “After all the failed attempts, my dev instinct kicked in and I pressed the F12 button on my computer key- board and opened the devel- oper console on the @IndiGo6E website and start- ed the whole check-in flow with network log record on,” he wrote.
For all the non- techie readers, when you press F12, it opens a set of developer
tools. It helps engineers look at requests and responses sent and received to and from a web- site server.
Kumar success- fully located the co-passenger and exchanged his bag. He also shared a list of security flaws addressing IndiGo to look into them.
IndiGo responded with a note claim- ing that they were sorry for the inconvenience caused and assured that the website had no security lapses.
The tweet thread has amassed over 5,000 likes and many reac- tions. People totally supported Kumar and shared their expe- riences with the airline.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine