Many major European airports were victims of a cyber-attack that disrupted the check-in and boarding systems. Initially, it was found at London Heathrow airport, Brandenburg airport in Berlin, and Brussels airport on Friday, 9/19. Only manual check-in was possible. Luckily, this was not a big travel weekend for Europeans and not many were affected. However, a bigger issue has come to light.
A flaw in the security systems to protect airport procedures has been found.
The victims of the attack were the check-in and boarding systems, not directly the airports or airlines. It is also not known who was behind these attacks. Travel analysts are shocked that this attack got past the defenses in place to protect the operations of the airline industry.
Typically, these attacks cross borders since disruptions occur at one airport, which affects the destinations. In addition, customers’ plans in their destinations get affected.
As stated before, the impacts of this attack were minor. But major cyber-attacks on airports can cause many flight delays or impact passenger and staff safety. These incidents could cause fatalities for passengers and staff if air traffic control technology or aircraft technology is tampered with.
Luckily, there are ways for airports to prevent cyberattacks more effectively. For example, increasing the amount of authentication measures to ensure only authorized personnel are accessing technological operations, updating software regularly, educating employees to detect phishing attempts, inventing a plan to respond to attacks to minimize impacts, and using AI or other threat-detection systems.
Although a lack of budget could be the reason these systems are not already in place. Technology is also always evolving, so threat detection always has to be studied and advanced to keep up with hackers and phishers.
Luckily, there were no widespread impacts from this attack on human safety and human convenience. However, there are efforts that weren’t taken to stop the scare from occurring to begin with.
