United Flights Halted: The Malicious Work Of A Hacker Or An Old-Fashioned Computer Glitch?

Was the world’s second-largest airline grounded for nearly an hour Tuesday morning by a hacker?

Probably not. But that was the immediate suspicion after Chicago-based United Airlines began experiencing significant problems with its flight dispatch system around 8 a.m. CT.

The Federal Aviation Administration quickly issued a ground stop, effectively shutting down the airline’s more than 700 jets (except, of course, those already in the air). The ground stop order was lifted about 40 minutes later.

Wired.com and other media outlets quickly posted online news stories about the event in which they quoted Tweets and other social media postings from passengers stuck onboard grounded United planes. Though all those early reports cautiously added that the actual cause of the dispatch system disruption remained unknown, at least to the website editors – they speculated that United’s system had been hacked into by outsiders.

And given both the nature of the tweets and other social media comments quoted in those stories, and given recent reporting about hackers attacking airline systems, it’s easy to understand why the speculation went so aggressively in that direction.

Ted Benson, a stranded United passenger tweeted, “Sitting on runway. Pilot inferring #UnitedAirlines has grounded all flights due to possible hack: fake flight plans found in system.”

View the original content and more from this author here: http://ift.tt/1Iat5OD

from hacker samurai http://ift.tt/1ANZ2ME
via IFTTT