Combating Cyber Attacks To Airliners

All computers can be vulnerable to cyber attacks, and because modern aircraft have computers integrated in them, they could be vulnerable, too. Engineers were aware of this fact way back in 1994, when the 777 airliner was first rolled out. Ever since then, they have been thinking of how to defend against these cyber attacks.

So far, the protections devised by those engineers—and the ones who came after them—have worked. No hacker has ever penetrated the computers of an airliner’s flight control system or any part of its avionics. The not-so-shocking news is that hackers have tried.

One of the men tasked to fight against hacks is Mike Vanguardia.

Vanguardia is a cybersecurity engineer with Boeing, the company that gave the world its first “e-Enabled” commercial airplane, the 787 Dreamliner. In 2006, as the Dreamliner was being born, the idea of an e-Enabled airplane—one that lets passengers connect to the Internet with commercial off-the-shelf electronics and Internet protocols, used for in-flight entertainment and some communications systems—wasn’t as scary as it is today. Back then, cybercrime was rare. Today, it is anything but. “The cyberthreat is always moving,” says Vanguardia, who is part of a team that studies the electronic connections on Boeing airliners, as they’re being designed, and tries to make sure that protections are built into them and into the airplanes’ software. His team, he says, is constantly asking, “What things have happened in the news that we haven’t thought about as we design?”