Airport Chaos in Europe: Cyberattack Grounds Passengers
Weekend Paralysis at European Airports
This past weekend will certainly be long remembered by thousands of passengers in Europe, and not because of successful holidays. A major cyberattack led to chaos at key airports, including London Heathrow, Berlin, and Brussels. Check-in problems, giant queues, and massive delays were the scenes that dominated airports from Friday evening onwards.
Who Was to Blame? An Attack on the Supplier, Not the Airports
Interestingly, the target of the attack was not the IT systems of the airports themselves. The hackers hit Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of the defense giant RTX, which supplies the "Muse" software for passenger and baggage check-in services. As a result of this single system's failure, airlines had to go back in time and return to... manual processing. One can only imagine how this affected throughput at such busy hubs. Who would have thought one piece of software could ground half of Europe?
Effects and Consequences
The consequences of the attack were severe:
- Hundreds of delayed or canceled flights,
- Paralyzed online check-in systems and self-service kiosks,
- Passengers forced to wait in queues for hours.
Brussels airport even went so far as to request the cancellation of some Monday flights, fearing that the supplier would not manage to patch its systems in time. This incident is a powerful wake-up call for the entire aviation industry and the critical infrastructure sector. It shows how dependent the modern world is on third-party suppliers and how fragile these digital supply chains can be. Fortunately, Polish airports were not targeted this time, but the situation serves as an important warning signal for everyone.
This is another attack on critical infrastructure – earlier, arson in Berlin caused a blackout affecting 50,000 customers. This attack fits into a broader trend of supply chain attacks, such as the unprecedented attack on the NPM repository, which threatened billions of JavaScript package downloads. The NIS2 Directive mandates supply chain security precisely to prevent such incidents.
Sources: The Guardian, SOCRadar, transinfo.pl, ITwiz
About the Author
Dyrektor ds. Technologii w SecurHub.pl
Doktorant z zakresu neuronauki poznawczej. Psycholog i ekspert IT specjalizujący się w cyberbezpieczeństwie.
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