As you strap yourself in and your jet gets noisier as the engines ready for take-off, and everything is out of your hands, you may give yourself over to worry. What if there’s some terrorist with a shoulder-held rocket that’s chosen your aircraft to attack? What if the threat is not nearby, but from some hacker who could be anywhere, and is planning a cyberjack – that could prove as destructive as any weapon?
Relax. Cyberjacking by a passenger is going to be exceedingly difficult, says a City University academic. Prof David Stupples writes in the 2015 Alumni magazine of City in London EC1. He says that it is possible to cyberjack a modern civilian aircraft; but the ‘but’ is very large.
He writes: “We’ve started working with Airbus and Cranfield University and what we’re doing is not looking at how we can protect a system from a cyberattack – because I think a great many of the controls are already in place and it’s debatable how much more secure we can get – but looking at cybersafety, which is something quite different. If there’s malware on the system – and we’re talking about any system, whether it’s aircraft, trains or nuclear power stations – the system needs to recognise it’s behaving in an irrational manner and then revert to a safe state.”
For the article in full visit – http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/july/cyberjacking-a-new-threat-to-air-travel.
