Northwest Airlines leaves Web users exposed

Northwest Airlines Friday said it is alerting customers who recently made purchases on its Frequent Flier Web site that their credit card numbers and personal information were unprotected because of a programming glitch.

Northwest spokesman Jon Austin said the risk of hackers getting the information is small, but one the airline is taking the situation seriously.

"We want to be able to take care of this ourselves because it is a problem we created and one we want to help resolve," he said.

The problem arose when a computer programmer doing maintenance on the site put the system back on line, but forgot to restore the security system. - Wall Street Journal Interactive