In August when the third largest airline, Delta Airlines had to cancel 451 flights it had made an excuse that a power outage had caused the incident but in the age of multiple redundant systems, backup generators, off-site backups, cloud storage and underground military grade data centers, this excuse should have been questioned from the get-go. Though, Georgia Power immediately disputed Delta’s report and said that it was Delta’s equipment not the power grid.
Nearly two months later, DEBKA, the Middle East and counter-terror report based in Israel have found that what was termed as a power outage was a cyber attack. Security experts suggested that a malware was inserted into Delta computers months ago and on command, the spyware shut down the systems and blocked emergency protocols to protect the company. They could not even write boarding passes because they could not confirm seats.
No global company maintains all of their servers and routers in a single place and they are located deep beneath the ground which has several backup electricity systems.
At the time of the incident, One America News Network (OANN) reported that a circuit breaker that needed to be reset caused the outage. No one else near or around or on the grid with Delta suffered any electrical disturbances during that period.
The cyber attack on Delta was also confirmed by Georgia Power. Huge companies rely on their computers which have a backup for power outage but dealing with a hack is much difficult. Even the Delta information boards were not showing old information that was stored in the cache which goes into default mode in the event of a malfunction or a reset.
Cyber attack is a nightmare for every organization and secure network across the globe.
Whoever is responsible for the Delta attack will possibly try again and with this information out, the airline company should take steps to avert it.
