BY DAVID FRANCIS
APRIL 15, 2015
The newest terrorist threat to planes? Wi-Fi.
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has concluded that cyberthreats are the latest risk — and potentially the hardest to find — to airlines. That’s because hackers increasingly may be able to access air traffic control systems and avionics that operate and guide planes that use Wi-Fi to fly.
“Internet connectivity in the cabin should be considered a direct link between the aircraft and the outside world, which includes potential malicious actors,” the new report found.
In other words, passengers sitting 35,000 feet above the Earth are surrounded by computer systems — from the program managing altitude to the one controlling cabin pressure — that are vulnerable to hacks. And if one system is hacked and a pilot or other program subsequently gets bad information, it could begin a cascade of errors that end in tragedy.
GAO didn’t specify what a cyberattack on an airline could look like. The reason why, according to John Knight, a University of Virginia professor of computer science who was consulted by GAO, is that modern airliners have so many vulnerable systems that it’s impossible to predict what a cyberattack would look like.
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