Yatra 2013 Data Breach

Yatra 2013 Data Breach: 5 Million Indian Travel Customers Exposed (Plaintext Passwords)

Hospitality & Travel / Online Travel Agency / Consumer / India

Yatra 2013 Data Breach: 5 Million Indian Travel Customers Exposed (Plaintext Passwords)

Major Indian online travel agency.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
17/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
Standard
Exposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
5.0MRecords
2013Year

The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.

Crucial data exposed
AddressPhysical address
Classification Tags
Cloud MisconfigurationHospitality & TravelTourismDirect Customers2013

Breach Summary

In September 2013, Yatra suffered a breach exposing about 5 million customer records, including email and physical addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers along with PINs and passwords stored in plain text. The breach went unnoticed until the data was offered for sale in 2018.

Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.

10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine

Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…

5.0M records analyzed

About Yatra

Yatra is a major Indian online travel company selling flights, hotels and holiday packages to Indian travelers.

Why They Hold Your Data

An online travel agency holds customer identity and contact data, physical addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and account credentials, plus booking PINs.

Recent Developments

Yatra continues to operate. The 2013 breach went undetected for years and only surfaced publicly in 2018 when the data reached dark-web markets.

Data Points Exposed

7 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Password High
Phone Number
Physical address High
PIN High

Breach Impact

The delayed discovery meant credentials circulated for years before disclosure, magnifying reuse exposure for affected Indian travelers.

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure

Principal Risk Advisory

What this means for a principal

A travel or hospitality breach: itinerary, loyalty and contact data supports pattern-of-life inference and travel-themed phishing. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.

What You Should Do

  1. Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
  2. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  3. Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
  4. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

  1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
  2. Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

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