Aviation News Item: 00783

8th May 2009

Source: ubmaviationnews.com

The US Department of Transportation has revealed after an internal audit that the FAA's administrative and mission support network has been penetrated by hackers multiple times in recent years, and that insufficient mechanisms are in place to monitor and detect these cyber attacks as well as to protect the authority's IT system and data. While the FAA's administrative and mission support network runs separately and independently from the network directly employed for the air traffic control (ATC) operations, the report concluded: " unless effective action is taken quickly, it is likely to be a matter of when, not if, ATC systems encounter attacks that do serious harm to ATC operations." The audit highlighted 763 high-risk, 504 medium-risk and 2,590 low-risk vulnerabilities in 70 web-based applications. Security systems to detect intrusion into the FAA's computer network are installed at only 11 of its 734 nation-wide facilities. Last February, hackers managed to access an internal database that held names, addresses, social security numbers, birth dates and salary levels for about 48,000 present and former FAA employees.

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