Overview
- Carnival's IT team detected unauthorized activity tied to a compromised employee account on April 14 and found by April 22 that passenger records had been copied, with the company publicly notifying customers on May 27.
- A regulatory filing lists 5,995,277 affected people, and the copied fields include names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and government ID numbers such as passport and driver’s‑license numbers.
- Carnival said the intrusion was achieved through social engineering against an employee, the company blocked the access, hired outside cybersecurity experts, strengthened monitoring, and set up a dedicated call center to help customers.
- Impacted customers are being offered two years of complimentary TransUnion credit monitoring and are urged to watch accounts and credit reports, consider fraud alerts or freezes, and contact local police if they spot identity theft; the TransUnion help line is 1-844-593-8310.
- Investigations and a file‑by‑file review are ongoing, and security experts warn that exposed government ID numbers sharply raise the risk of identity fraud and that social‑engineering attacks against employees are an increasing threat vector for large organizations.