In the aftermath of Covid19, airlines and airports all over the world found themselves in an increasingly vulnerable position with respect to new cybersecurity threats. Accounting for all associated risks, corporate IT departments are focusing on prevention and mitigation mechanisms for the common DDOS, ransomware, and other types of attacks. Yet there is one spot in the new attack perimeter that security teams lack visibility into: the networks of all employees working remotely.
With the emergence of Covid-19, the air transportation industry had to employ critical measures to protect the health of employees and keep operations running smoothly. One of these measures was the transition to remote work, which led to increased cybersecurity risks for corporate networks, as remote workers entered into constant interaction with the enterprise's IT infrastructure.
“It was only recently I was going through an airport and I realised how much is now automated, unmanned systems.
The more unmanned devices or systems there are, for example ticketing and baggage operations, the more threats are attracted.”
- Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at ESET.
Indeed, the increased level of automation in the air transportation industry can lead to hugely disruptive consequences in case of a major breach. But yet another attack vector is all the sensitive information stored on companies’ servers.
In 2018, a data breach impacted 380,000-500,000 customers of British Airways, compromising login details, payment card details, and travel booking details. This data breach went undetected for over two months.
Now, with the adoption of remote work policies, hackers will attempt to leverage the unsupervised remote networks to access company assets through
