European Airport Chaos: How a Cyberattack on Collins Aerospace Grounded Passengers

A Weekend of Paralysis at Europe's Airports

Thousands of travelers across Europe won't forget last weekend anytime soon, and not because of a great vacation. A major cyberattack threw key airports into chaos, including London Heathrow, Berlin and Brussels. From Friday evening on, the scene at these airports was the same: check-in failures, enormous lines and widespread delays.

Who Was to Blame? An Attack on a Vendor, Not the Airports

The attackers did not go after the airports' own IT systems. Instead, they hit Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of defense giant RTX that supplies the "Muse" software used for passenger and baggage check-in. Once that single system went down, airlines had to turn back the clock and process passengers... by hand. It's easy to imagine what that did to capacity at some of the busiest airports on the continent. Who would have thought that one piece of software could ground half of Europe?

Impact and Consequences

The fallout from the attack was severe:

• Hundreds of flights delayed or canceled,
• Online check-in systems and self-service kiosks knocked offline,
• Passengers forced to wait in line for hours.

Brussels Airport went as far as asking airlines to cancel some of their Monday flights, fearing the vendor would not be able to restore its systems in time. The incident is a loud wake-up call for the entire aviation industry and the critical infrastructure sector as a whole. It shows how dependent the modern world is on third-party vendors, and how fragile these digital supply chains can be. Fortunately, Polish airports were not targeted this time, but the situation is an important warning sign for everyone.

This is yet another attack on critical infrastructure. Earlier, an arson attack in Berlin caused a blackout that affected 50,000 customers. The incident also fits a broader trend of supply chain attacks, such as the unprecedented attack on the NPM registry, which put billions of JavaScript package downloads at risk. The NIS2 Directive requires organizations to secure their supply chains precisely to prevent incidents like this one.

Sources: The Guardian, SOCRadar, transinfo.pl, ITwiz