American Airlines sues online publisher, host over fake website

American Airlines sued website publishing system Joomla and host CloudAccess on Sunday in Manhattan federal court for allegedly allowing a counterfeit website to steal user credentials for the airline's site.

Unknown parties misused American's trademarks and copyrights to trick consumers into believing americanairlines.joomla.com was the real website for the airline's cargo services, and Joomla and CloudAccess never responded after American told them about it, according to the complaint. 

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Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
AAL	AMERICAN AIRLINES GROUP INC.	13.88	-0.25	-1.77%

American declined to comment. American's attorney Daniel Filor of Greenberg Traurig didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did CloudAccess or Joomla's owner Open Source Matters Inc.

The complaint said that Joomla provides free software for creating and launching websites hosted on CloudAccess' platform. According to American, Joomla allowed a user to create the fake American website without verifying whether the person was affiliated with the company, and Joomla "would have quickly realized that the person creating the account was not affiliated with American" if it had "made any effort to do so."

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The airline said the Joomla site collects usernames, passwords, and email addresses from consumers who think they are signing into an account to track American cargo shipments, which can be sold to hackers or used to access to their American accounts and others with similar login credentials.

American said it told Joomla and CloudAccess about the fake site as early as last December, but they never responded. The website is still active.

The case is American Airlines Inc v. Open Source Matters Inc, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:21-cv-06681.