Even though dozens of reporters are on DaveNet, only one inquiry came in from a press person, and that inquiry was about the trust issue I mentioned in the postscript, which is a long-term issue largely of interest to web server developers, and shouldn't concern system managers and users much. As an experiment I tried calling their main number to see if they could receive a security alert over the phone, and found that they had a company policy to not give out phone numbers. I could make a reservation, but I couldn't speak with their computer operations people. I said it was an emergency. I asked to speak to their president, but the request was refused.
Airline safety is a big deal.
Sure a hacker probably can't impact airline safety thru a frequent flier mileage database, but we don't know that that's the only hole that was opened yesterday. Change that password right now folks. Even without the IIS hole, a hacker could easily guess the passwords that many people are using. Remember Murphy Further, since the hole has been there since IIS shipped, we have no idea what other data was compromised due to the hole that was revealed yesterday. Remembering Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.