From the past few months, most of the commercial airlines have witnessed a dip in their profits- all due to the fast spreading corona virus pandemic injected global shutdown of air travel.
Adding to this torment is a report released by Eurocontrol that says that most of the airliners are facing the constant threat of being hit by a sophisticated cyber attack.
The Eurocontrol data that was compiled by the European Air Traffic Management Computer Emergency Response team stated that a rise by 530% was witnessed in the cyber attacks hitting commercial airliners during 2020-2021.
What’s good in the report is that none of the attacks reported were directed against critical aircraft systems or passenger mobile devices connected to in-flight internet.
According to the report, a total of 775 cyber attacks were launched on airlines over the course of 2020. And that includes 200 on aviation related OEMs and 150 on airports.
Out of the attacks, a majority of them were attributed to be financially motivated, leading to financial loss, theft of personal data and some to malign the image of the company/s.
Eurocontrol says that hackers are launching attacks on airliners by creating fraudulent website pages on the web to steal data and funds from those visiting the site to book tickets and other services.
Cyber Attack report on aviation industry highlighted that some attacks against high-profile companies like EasyJet proved successful to the cyber crooks as info related to over 9 million EasyJet customers was accessed, stolen and sold on the dark web by the hackers.
By providing a secure medium of communication, and transactions by companies involved in airlines business might help curb attacks on the industry, say experts.
