Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Seattle-Tacoma International Airport suffered a cyberattack over the weekend, disrupting flights and baggage operations as well as internet and phone services. It is still unclear who is behind the cyberattack that hit Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Saturday, causing hundreds of delayed flights, wreaking havoc with baggage sorting systems and taking down internet and phone services over the weekend. As of Monday afternoon, the airport’s email, phone and other systems were still down.
“We’re working around the clock to get necessary systems back online and to mitigate impacts to our passengers,” Lance Lyttle, the airport’s aviation managing director, told reporters on Sunday. On Saturday and Sunday, a total of 474 departing flights—accounting for roughly a third of the airport’s scheduled departures—were delayed, according to data from FlightAware. The situation appears to have improved on Monday, when 78 flights out of Sea-Tac—about 11% of the airport’s total scheduled departures—were delayed as of 1:30 p.
m. Pacific Time. Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines, which both use Sea-Tac as a hub, were not directly affected.
But both airlines advised passengers over the weekend to avoid checking bags if possible. “The airlines themselves were not attacked,” says Cliff Steinhauser, director of information security and engagement at the non-profit National Cybersecurity Alliance. “But the airlines have to rely on the airport for services like baggage handling.
” Airport security checkpoints were not affected, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). “TSA’s security equipment and operations were not impacted by the outage,” the agency said in an email. “We would like to reinforce that the security of the traveling public was never in question and the TSA has continued to screen all passengers and baggage with our robust screening procedures.
” To be on the safe side, the TSA is recommending that passengers traveling through Sea-Tac print their boarding passes at home or load the boarding passes onto their cell phones. The FBI confirmed to Forbes via email that it is aware of the incident but provided no further comment. “We don’t know yet what type of attack this is or if there’s a ransomware involved,” says Steinhauser.
“But we often see threat actors going after these types of critical infrastructure systems, infecting them with ransomware to get maximum leverage to force the victim to pay.” A more dangerous possibility would be the involvement of a foreign country. “There’s always this greater worry when you’re talking about critical infrastructure of a nation state actor executing an attack where they’re bringing down a system to cause disruption or chaos, or some type of other end,” says Steinhauser.
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