Airbus which happens to be the second biggest aerospace company in the world was hit by a cyberattack recently. The objective behind the attack was to steal business secrets and some sensitive info about future projects and hackers from China happen to be on suspicion radar.
According to the highly placed sources, the attacks took place in segmented style within 12 months and the motive was to steal the technical secrets on aircraft build of the Airbus A350 Passenger Jet and Airbus Military Transport Plane A400M which is touted to have the world’s largest propeller engine.
In January this year, the European aerospace company stated that a digital invasion made by threat actors resulted in unauthorized access to data.
But security experts from Cisco Talos suggest that the attack was outlined with an orchestration bid towards a massacre.
Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to notify a fact over here that the attack took place on Airbus via 4 suppliers/ contractors- the British engine maker Rolls Royce, French technology company Expleo, and two other France based contractors whose networks were first compromised to infiltrate into Airbus systems.
The good news is that the threat monitoring solutions identified the cyber threat in time and neutralized the effect of Airbus systems.
“As large companies are always well-protected, hackers try to sneak into their client networks to get access to a large company database,” says Holger Schulze, CEO, and Founder of Cybersecurity Insiders.
Note 1- As China’s airplane maker Comac is struggling to get proper certification for its C919 aircraft build, it might have hired some state-funded hackers to learn about the mechanics of engines and avionics of Airbus. However, this theory is just a suspicion and not a confirmation.
Note 2- Was Chinese hacking group APT10 behind the cyber incident is yet to be known? However, this organization which runs on the funds given by Chinese intelligence (Chinese Ministry of State Security CMSS) is known to launch several cyber attack campaigns related to espionage on large companies working across the world.
Note 3- On September 27th, 2019 Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang denied the allegations and confirmed that the nation was a firm defender of network security.
