Aviation securityCyber attack could paralyze air traffic
This summer we saw the release of the world’s first cyber superweapon, which was said to be targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as infrastructure systems in China; the Stuxnet worm could break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves; a similar cyber weapon could allow an attacker to take down air-control systems
Around the world, around the clock, circles of flickering screens keep aircraft apart in the air, ease them gently down to the ground, and guide their precious human cargoes off the runway.
This finely choreographed global dance of large, speeding planes moved almost five billion passengers in 2009, according to data from Airports Council International.
What would happen, though, if all these screens went blank?
Inside the glass bulb of the Hong Kong airport control tower, a dozen staff watch the dots on their computers transform into planes rapidly descending from the sky. A few floors below, more staff sit at screens in a room with no windows and keep digital tabs on all of the city’s airspace, from the tip of the tower to far out over the South China Sea.
Computers, radar, navigation and weather data systems, radio communications — all work together to allow aircraft to land, take off, and taxi without incident.
Computers are vulnerable to cyber attack, though, and this worries the world’s intelligence community.
AFP reports that the head of Interpol, Ronald K. Noble, issued a stark warning to the international police agency’s first ever cyber-threat conference in Hong Kong in September. “We have been lucky so far that terrorists did not — at least successfully or at least of which we are aware — launch cyberattacks,” he told 300 of the world’s top law enforcement officials from fifty-six countries. “One may wonder if this is a matter of style. Terrorists may prefer the mass media coverage of destroyed commuter trains, buildings brought down. But until when?”
Within weeks of Noble addressing the conference, news broke of the world’s first cyber superweapon which was said to be targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as infrastructure systems in China. The Stuxnet worm could break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.
It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines, or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.
A worm is piece of malicious software (malware) which copies itself and sends itself on to other computers in a network, usually without the computers’ operators even knowing it is there.
At Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport, nobody seems particularly worried. Carl Modder is the senior man on deck in a control tower that handles a take-off or landing every minute of the day.
“Our system runs on
