Cyber Attacks: A Growing Issue For Airlines

 In a world of growing technological advances, it is easy to take the ease one experiences in daily life for granted. You can access almost anything through your phone, the news, the weather, what's playing in theaters, even listen to music or play games. That is all on one device! What is the common link in all that data however? Its need to connect to other servers to gather the requested information. Therein lies the risk we face today. The unseen.

Aviation as a whole is electronically intertwined, as such a majority of systems are susceptible to outside interference. This risk has been brought to light by a study done by ImmuniWeb where they checked cybersecurity, compliance, and privacy (The State of Security). Their results were rather astounding, “97 out of 100 the world’s largest airports have security risks related to vulnerable web and mobile applications, misconfigured public cloud, Dark Web exposure or code repositories leaks.” (The State of Security). Even in the last 4 years 20.82 million people have been impacted in just 5 information breaches where their personal data was stolen (CnSight). It is clear that cyber threats are on the rise and airlines and airports are struggling to keep up with fast moving software and hardware advances. 

Such a massive industry for all its efforts really does have a massive spear to avoid. Air service providers should work together to show areas of weakness, show places they've been hit, and work with cyber specialists to come up with solutions and implement them.  Airlines are huge parts of worldwide infrastructure. Losing data to hacks is not ideal, especially if you are on the receiving end, but potentially losing an aircraft to such a thing is very real and must be prevented. The industry as a whole must adequately address and mitigate this threat. Closed networks and software updates, even utilizing white hats may be necessary to keep aviation afloat in the coming years.

Top 5 cyber attacks in the aviation industry (n.d.) CnSight

   https://cnsight.io/2021/04/16/top-5-cyber-attacks-in-the-aviation-industry/

 The state of civil aviation cybersecurity (2020, August 9) Anastasios Arampatzis

   https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/civil-aviation-cybersecurity/