A cyber security expert has warned there is little the aviation industry can do to mitigate future IT outages following the aftermath of July’s CrowdStrike nightmare.
After last month’s IT outage forced thousands of flight cancellations globally, cyber security expert James Bore has told ARGS that airlines will have to “stop everything” again in future similar events.
July’s incident plunged airports and airlines into panic, grounding thousands of aircraft after a faulty update caused Windows systems to go down.
Asked by ARGS what steps aviation stakeholders can take to mitigate the severity of future IT outages, Bore said there are “none”.
“The reason for that is safety takes precedence. The problem wasn’t that [airlines] couldn’t continue flying or that they couldn’t get people on planes.
“The problem was that they couldn’t have done that perfectly safely. We can’t do it perfectly safely anyway, but we can do it with a very high success rate when you consider that we’re putting thousands of people through the air constantly.
“If anything breaks down in that system, because it’s so big and so complex, it’s like Windows.
“You get something that goes wrong and say, ‘All we can do at this point is stop everything, because if it gets any worse people [will] die, the plane will crash and it will be a disaster.
“There isn’t really anything you can do to prevent a small error from causing massive problems in [an industry like] aviation.”
Cyber security specialist Lisa Ventura, added: “We saw first hand how much of the critical national infrastructure [in the UK] use CrowdStrike by how much of it was impacted when it happened.”
