Man says he hacked airline website to find lost luggage

  • 09 Apr - 15 Apr, 2022
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Mag Files

A man says he was forced to hack into a domestic Indian airline's website to find his missing luggage. Nandan Kumar, 28, called IndiGo – a low-cost carrier – for help, after realising that he had swapped his bag with a co-passenger. But after IndiGo refused to help him trace the other person, Mr Kumar said he was able to retrieve information about him from the airline website. In a series of tweets, Mr Kumar, a software engineer, said by the time he got to the airport luggage belt, a co-passenger had taken his bag and left. He was able to identify the other person's PNR through a luggage tag, but when he called the airline to ask for information about the passenger, they refused to help, citing privacy and data protection rules. The next morning, Mr Kumar says he decided to "take matters" into his own hands. He started digging into IndiGo's website using his co-passenger's PNR, in the hope of finding an address or a phone number. He tried various methods – using the check-in process, by editing the booking and updating the contact. But none of it worked. "After all failed attempts, my developer instinct kicked in and I pressed the F12 button on my computer keyboard and opened the developer console on the IndiGo website," Mr Kumar said. "I thought 'let me check the network logs'." What he found was surprising – his co-passenger's phone number. But it all ended well for Mr Kumar and his bag. He called his fellow passenger with the phone number he had retrieved from the system logs, and the two met up to swap their luggage.


US astronaut and Russian cosmonauts return to Earth together as war in Ukraine continues

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut have returned to Earth from the International Space Station amid growing tension over Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. NASA's Mark Vande Hei and the Russian Space Agency's Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov landed safely in Kazakhstan after leaving the ISS aboard the same capsule. There was much speculation about whether the turmoil between the countries would spill over onto space affairs. "People have problem on Earth. On orbit ... we are one crew," Shkaplerov said in a live NASA TV broadcast. "The space station is a symbol of "friendship and cooperation and ... future of exploration of space." Even before the invasion began, Vande Hei said he avoided discussions on political turmoil, per a news agency. "I'm not sure we really want to go there," he said. Russia's attack on Ukraine continues after their forces launched a large-scale invasion on February 24 – the first major land conflict in Europe in decades.

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