Business travelers are some of the most at-risk victims of cyberattacks, but don’t seem to realize it, according to an IBM Security report conducted by Morning Consult released Tuesday. The transportation industry has become the second-most attacked industry, and since January 2018, some 566 million records have been either leaked or compromised in the travel industry, the report found.
While the majority of business professionals (70%) engage in high-risk behavior during travel, only 40% said they believed they would be targeted for cybercrimes while on the road, the report found.
“Traveling has always been when people are at their most vulnerable. A few hundred years ago, the perpetrators were pirates or highwaymen. Now those criminals are still out there, but they’ve changed their methods to focus on digital attacks instead,” Caleb Barlow, vice president of X-Force Threat Intelligence at IBM Security, said in a press release. “People carry a goldmine of data when traveling including passports, payment information and detailed travel itineraries. When placed in the hands of a cybercriminal, all of this information can be patched together into a complete picture of the traveler’s life to inform identity theft, initiate spear phishing attacks, or be sold on the dark web.”
