Cyber vulnerabilities in Aviation
 

With the biggest and successful cyber attack in Australian History taking place this afternoon, Optus, it got me thinking, how vulnerable is Aviation? Two successful attempts in the last year, Nine Network and now Optus.

Air Services would be a clear target. With Russia and China seeking to punish Australia over standing up for itself, only a matter of time around who is next.

You are more at risk from a Nigerian Prince than Russia or China stealing your identity. Don't click on forwarded links and respond to emails asking for login details and such and you will be 99% safe as a general member of the public.

If the majors did manage to crash Airservices or the BoM site it would not be noticed, their own systems crash and fail all on their own. The bigger risk to air safety at present is the move to over-reliance on single system navigation, GNSS, it can be turned off, jammed, hacked, whatever.

As was often the case when operating across southern and central Turkey during the Syrian crisis. It was not unusual to have minimal GPS satellites available and a NAV GPS FAULT and GPS PRIMARY LOST for periods of time.

Some reading I did at the time surprised me:
The GPS signal is a low power signal. It is comparable to the power emitted by a 60W light-bulb located more than 20,000 km away from the surface of the earth. This means that the signal could easily be disturbed by any ground source located near an aircraft and emitting in the GPS L1 frequency band (1575.42 MHz +/-10 MHz), leading to the loss of GPS data