Jeppesen attack: Sharing the information is key for cybersecurity
The recent cyber incident reported by Jeppesen, a Boeing company, on Nov 2, 2022, affected thousands of pilots and disrupted many flight planning worldwide. Specifically, this cyberattack caused Jeppesen to freeze all map updates and withhold the NOTAM messages sent via their app, and as a result, some of the flight data was out of date.
While this cyberattack was rolling in a few weeks, some interesting implications are worth mentioning.
The first and most notable one, is with regard to the FAA RNAV Advisory Circular, stating that current onboard navigation must be up to date for all aircrafts, hinting to the operators that flying with an expired GPS or inaccurate navigation data can be dangerous. During the Jeppesen attack, all users’ information was falling behind, limiting the data accuracy available for the aircrew.
The second one, Jeppesen, stated on their website that they “…immediately initiated an incident response process and are working to reactivate individual products to our hosted production environment”. No elaboration of these means, a timetable for mitigating the attack, and means of future attack prevention were mentioned. This obscurity does not aid the end users and operators in building and maintaining their mitigation steps and plans.
The third point is prevalent in the aviation sector and is one of its most significant setbacks in mitigating major cyber crimes and attacks; lack of sharing. Regarding safety incidents, the operators, OEMs, suppliers, and others are sharing the details of the incident to learn, understand, mitigate and prevent the following incident as much as possible. Differently, almost all cyber incidents on aircrafts are hidden (mainly from the public eye), data is not shared, means of understanding and prevention are not delivered, and each player in the industry remains in their asylum.
There is an old-new threat to the aviation industry – the cyber threat. The initiative, regulators, operators, and OEMs should understand and react to it. Aside from technology and tools for mitigating it, the knowledge must be shared.
The writer is Chief Technology Officer at Cyviation Ltd.
TO All BLOG 
