Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations
23 comments
·December 19, 2025mtlynch
>The Avelo team was responsive, professional, and took the findings seriously throughout the disclosure process. They acknowledged the severity, worked quickly to remediate the issues, and maintained clear communication. This is a model example of how organizations should handle security disclosures.
Sounds like no bug bounty?
It's great if OP is happy with the outcome, but it's so infuriating that companies are allowed to leak everyone's data with zero accountability and rely on the kindness of security researchers to do free work to notify them.
I wish there was a law that assigned a dollar value to different types of PII leaks and fined the organization that amount with some percentage going to the whistleblower. So a security researcher could approach a vendor and say, "Hi! I discovered vulnerabilities in your system that would result in a $500k fine for you. For $400k, I'll disclose it to you privately, or you can turn me down and I'll receive $250k from your fines."
edent
> I wish there was a law that assigned a dollar value to different types of PII leaks
There is. It is called GDPR.
Plenty of companies have been fined for leaks like this.
Some countries also have whistleblower bounties but, as you might expect, there are some perverse incentives there.
CtrlAltNerd
Great work, very impressive find.
mattmaroon
Major? Avelo?
null
klysm
Annoying sensationalist writing, but good find!
Nextgrid
This is about a non-rate-limited endpoint providing ticket data given a booking code only (and not last name as it's usually the case), which makes it feasible to bruteforce the entire search space.
(unfortunately, I feel like AI was overused in authoring the writeup)
filearts
Is it really AI slop if someone leverages AI to improve / transform their novel experiences and ideas into a rendition that they prefer?
I'm not suggesting whether or not the article is AI assisted. I'm wondering if the ease of calling someone's work "AI slop" is a step along the slippery slope towards trivializing this sort of drive-by hostility that can be toxic in a community.
Nextgrid
You are right about the toxicity, I will edit my comment.
There's a difference between leveraging AI to proofread or improve parts of their writing and this - I feel like AI was overused here; gave the whole article that distinctive smell and significantly reduced its information density.
dado3212
What makes you say that? This didn't read like AI slop to me.
Nextgrid
Overuse of bulleted lists, unnecessary sensationalism, sentences like "The requests flew. There was no WAF, no IP blocking, no CAPTCHA." and so on. It reeks of someone pasting some notes into a chat prompt and asking it to spruce it up for publication.
PKop
Pattern recognition skill issue then. It did to me.
"The fallout"
This flaw was critical.
And other vibes. You know it when you see it, though it may be hard to define.
mmooss
> You know it when you see it
How do you know your perception is accurate? One of humanity's biggest weaknesses is trusting that kind of response.
sallveburrpi
What is the AI slop version of “This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.”
?
tverbeure
> This incident is a stark reminder
A stark reminder is a stark reminder about the existence of AI slop. You see the phrase a lot in social media comment spam.
The 6 hour claim is interesting, but I highly doubt Avelo (or any airline) would handle 100k requests/sec
If we consider that the real major's move about 400k-500k passengers/day, let's be really optimistic and say that they check their booking 6 times a day for the week before they fly. That's around 250 requests/sec.
Anyone know about the consumer facing tech stacks at airlines these days? Seems unlikely that they'd have databases that would auto scale 400x...