Day the Earth Stood Still

Fresh off the heels of a massive Southwest system crash, flyers recently experienced even more costly delays and cancellations. 

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A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage caused flights to be unexplainably grounded on Wednesday.

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The FAA released a statement saying, "Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack." 

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Furthermore, the FAA said they were going to "take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again."

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The corrupted file was apparently also present in the system's backup. 

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Let's speculate

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The government would understandably want to reassure the public there was no bad guy lurking in the shadows. So let's pretend the government could lie to its people (because that has never happened before), and there really was some vulnerability that was exploited. 

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After all, we've seen things like that happen before. For example, in 2022 three Russian spies were indicted for their efforts of targeting energy infrastructure in 135 countries, and you can easily find similar examples with an online search.

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It would not be insanity to suggest the possibility remains a similar type of vulnerability could be targeted in the future to the detriment of a system we heavily rely on. 

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Unfortunately, these types of occurrences are becoming more frequent, much to the chagrin of everyone who is consistently reminded by yet another cyber awareness course they are required to complete. 

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All we can do is keep a watchful eye on the FAA's actions in the near future, and please tell any relatives you have working with critical systems to be wary of any emails claiming there are "hot singles" in the area who want to meet. 

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All it takes is one randy uncle to fall for a phishing scheme, and your spring break plans will be ruined.