Flightradar24, a website used to track flights in transit, was reportedly hit by 3 cyber attacks on Monday this week and the services were still down till late Tuesday. As the attempts made by the IT staff failed to restore the website to the core, a third party security services provider was engaged to bring back the digital services to normalcy.
Reports are in that the database of Flightradar24 was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, and prima facie says that no data was compromised in the incident.
Around 180,000 flights are tracked by Flightradar24 users on a daily note, and that includes those using services of Airbus, Boeing and Etihad.
What’s amazing about this online service is the fact that it helps users identify a flight based on the flight number, model, and signal codes send during distress. For those who have subscribed for a premium, more services such as location of the flight during the time of crash and last signal time is also available. Mostly, such services are used by media reporters who cover news incidents related to flight crashes and those who own private jets.
Note- Started in the year 2006; Flightradar24 is reported to have over 2 million daily users and has been app downloaded over 40 million times. So, such a distinctive service being hit by a cyber attack on two consecutive days is raising questions on whether the attack was launched by any state funded actors.
