Yesterday, the US Transportation Secretary said on a national news media outlet that the federal government is not prepared to rule out the possibility that a cyber-attack as behind the recent shutdown of the FAA's air traffic safety alert computer system on Wednesday morning.
The week ago, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) discovered there was a “bug” in the NOTAM warning system on the night of 10 January and attempted a full reboot to fix the problem. The reboot did not work. The next day the FAA was forced to ground more than 10,500 flights “within, into, or out of the United States yesterday”, according to the tracking website FlightAware. This was the biggest travel disruption since the national no-fly order from 11 September 2001. Technically, all commercial flights were grounded, but briefly. For comparison, two days prior, when there were no problems detected, the number of flights in the same category delayed was just over 4,100. Many travelers scrambled to rebook flights at a time when there was not a great deal of slack in the system to deal with a spike in cancellations.[1]
Reporter (18 January): “We have seen domestic attacks on other aspects of our critical infrastructure, on power substations, of course. Are we absolutely positive this was not the result of any nefarious activity, either domestic or foreign?” [2]
US Transportation SEC: “We're not prepared to rule that out. There hasn’t been any indication of that. The FBI has spoken to this, and of course, FAA is looking at that as well as they work to see exactly what was going on inside the files that were in the system leading to this irregularly. Again, what I would say is there’s no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity. But we are not yet prepared to rule that out.”
OK, was it a “bug’ or a “hack?” When maritime vessels lose cyber capabilities, they start floating in the water. If this happens with planes, well the results are not as harmless.
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[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/infrastructure/transportation-faa-glitch-grinds-air-traffic-to-a-halt
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/01/11/buttigieg_not_prepared_to_rule_out_cyber_attack_behind_faa_safety_alert_system_outage.html
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