You must have at least once seen your friends posting photos of their trip, including photos of the tickets. Or even you have done that on your own to express how excited you were about your journey. It sounds harmless at first, but the information on the ticket, such as name, date of birth, the destinations or the barcode could be exploited by hackers to break in and take your personal information as well as your accounts on the internet. Even the schedule of the flights could also be changed by any expert who sees your photos on social network.
Brian Krebs, an IT expert from US wrote an article to advise tourists not to share too much information of their trip on social networks. He even warned people not to drop the used flight tickets in the garbage. The reason is that anyone can accidently or intentionally collect those seemingly useless stuffs for bad purposes. Experienced travellers will tear their tickets into small pieces and discard them after the flights.
Krebs said that next time when you are about to throw away the ticket which still have the barcode on it, just tear it apart. The barcode has valuable information that you don’t want anyone to know, such as the flight schedule in the future or online accounts.
Sian John, head of cyber security at Symantec, a US security company, said users should not reveal too much information about their travels to social networking sites because the boarding pass might disclosure more information than you think. Criminals can base on that to steal your money and you might not even notice.
“Another important thing is that when you share with people about your trip, may be by taking a photo at the airport, do you think that you are indirectly sending a VIP invitation ticket to the criminals to your home?” If the answer is yes, you should be very careful.
It doesn’t mean that you have to completely turn the internet off or stop using social network when travelling. You just have to be aware of the information in each of your posts. Let’s think about more than 3 billion current internet users and nearly 1.3 billion of Facebook users, you can somehow imagine how risky publishing your information is.
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