1,400 passengers were stranded at Poland’s Warsaw Chopin airport earlier this month after authorities were forced to ground dozens of aircraft belonging to Poland’s LOT Airlines in response to a computer attack disrupting the systems LOT uses to establish its flight plans.
Although the attack lasted five hours, LOT was forced to cancel 10 domestic and international flights and delay another dozen while its technician hastily worked to resolve the issue. Fortunately, flights Chopin bound flights were unaffected and landed safety.
The issue marks the beginning of what will become an industry-wide problem as an increasingly number of airlines transition their paper-and-binder-based flight plans, dispatch operations, as well as the planes themselves, to wholly digital systems; just earlier this year, American Airlines was forced to ground its entire 737 fleet because the iPad app managing its flight plans crashed, meanwhile, an A400M aircraft crashed in Spain because of a software error prevented fully functioning engines from working properly.
LOT Airlines hasn’t provided much information explaining exactly why its systems crashed, or whether it was truly penetrated, but in speaking with Reuters, a company spokesman suggests the culprit may have been a denial of service attack — an online attack the floods servers with requests to point of overload. If confirmed, the attack would mark the first instance of a flight disruption arising from malicious hacking.
What also remains unclear is how enough outside traffic capable of crashing a server could have even breached the airline’s private network in the first place, as DoD attacks typically occur over public networks such as a company website’s server.
An assertion we can make, however, is that the number of similar such instances will undoubtedly compound over the next decade until transportation authorities realize that a premium must be placed on cybersecurity and debugging.
Source: NYTimes
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