A new report “Hacking Our Nation’s Airports: Cyber-Kinetic Threats to the Technologies Running Airport Operations” finds there are threats to airplane passengers and crew safety with vulnerabilities in the technologies that run airport operations.
"If you're not addressing the vulnerabilities that exist in those systems, in those equipments, cyber adversaries can actually exploit them to cause anything from disruption to physical harm to passengers and to crew," said Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) Executive Director Parham Eftekhari.
He said for years, air travel safety concerns have focused on physical threats from terrorists.
Passengers shouldn’t panic, but should stop taking their safety for granted. They need to be aware of these things and question new technology and how vulnerabilities will be managed.
"Across the board in every industry, this is not being done right now because it's expensive and it takes a long time to develop that code and basically it's cost prohibitive," said Eftekhari.
He said the airline industries have a wrong attitude.
He added the biggest reason why this isn't be addressed is because people aren't complaining about it.
Like with the Boeing 737 Max incident, poorly written software code can lead to kinetic impacts.