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Thwarting Cyber attacks
September 1st 2015
Protecting the enormous amount of data airlines hold in their IT systems is a major security issue for the aviation industry. Read More »
International Air Transport Association (IATA) director general and CEO, Tony Tyler, told delegates at a recent Singapore security conference that in one recent month alone, the association identified and blocked an average of 80,000 suspicious connections per day, detected and cleared 891 viruses and resisted five ‘brute forcing’ attempts (overpowering a computer’s defences by repetition) to connect to IATA accounts.
The first line of attack to come to mind is that terrorists could hack into airline data bases and play havoc with airline systems. Security experts don’t discount this threat, but they cautioned in Singapore that the possibility of terrorists bringing down aircraft was remote.
Airlines also are most mindful of the damage hackers could do to their businesses. The IT systems that interlink an airline’s various departments are not stand alone systems. They are interconnected to the systems of airline partners, including GDSs, airports and a host of other service providers.
Hackers can gain access to airline systems through these “back doors”. If they succeed, fraudsters will find a pot of gold: the personal and credit card details of hundreds of millions of airline customers.
Hackers with malicious intent also could cause systems to crash, check-in counters to freeze and ground handling operations, flight planning and other aspects of operations to grind to a halt.
Attacks on external services, such as electricity grids or communications networks, would have a similar impact on airlines that would create chaos as well as financial losses and reputational damage to the airlines attacked.
Experts and industry insiders have told Orient Aviation it is not a matter of if an attack will happen but when. LOT Polish Airlines has already been a victim of hackers. It was forced to cancel flights after a hacking attack.
Asia-Pacific carriers know the issue must be addressed with priority. IATA’s Tyler has red flagged it, but has said the industry can’t counter hackers with one arm, metaphorically speaking, tied behind its back.
Industry cooperation, while an absolute necessity, will not get us where we need to be, he said in July. “Governments have resources and access to intelligence that the private sector cannot achieve. They also have a responsibility to use these resources to support industry efforts. We have an example of this approach in the decades of successful government-industry cooperation on safety. Unfortunately, we have not achieved this level of cooperation in security,” he said.
Let’s hope we won’t have to wait until a major Cyber Security breach happens for this government-industry relationship to change.
