Southwest has moved quickly to fix a security breach in its mobile application after a software engineer ran to the media in the US to highlight the problem.
David Stites apparently found the error in the Southwest iPhone app in December last year and notified the airline immediately, only to discover weeks later that nothing had been done about the issue.
According to the Colorado-based engineer, information being transferred from a user's handset to the airline was not being encrypted, meaning that hackers could "have access to anything you have access to, such as address, email, phone, credit cards", he told KRDO.
Both KRDO and Stites were ignored when the breach was highlighted again.
"People rush to get products out, the engineering dollars are not there to complete the project, so security falls to the back," claims Stites.
It now turns out that Southwest released an updated version of the app to the iTunes store earlier this week, fixing the bug in the system.
Southwest officials have admitted the problem, but have played down its significance:
This new app will fix the isolated security vulnerability issues. We pushed a message to the homepage of all iPhone App users to advise that there is a new app available for them to download.
"We have no reports of members information being compromised. It was a small, isolated issue and the breach would only occur if someone with savvy is in an unsecured wifi location and tries to pull certain pockets of information."
The Southwest iPhone app is regularly in the top ten most popular travel mobile applications in the US. The first app was launched in December 2009, launching in the appstore in January 2010.