Was British Air Traffic Control Outage the work of Hackers?

On Friday, almost the entire British Air Traffic Control system went down for several hours. CNN was of course massively speculative, at first saying it was a "massive computer failure" then saying it was a "widespread power outage". London's entire airspace was shut down, affecting air traffic at Heathrow, Gatwick, and Standstead. Heathrow and Gatwick are two of the top ten world's busiest airports.

This morning, the "official story" was released, in which the outage was blamed on "too many workstations being added to the network to accommodate extra inquiries during the busy Christmas travel season".

Now, I have a bit of a background in IT, and have lived in the EU. The EU is one of the most heavily regulated areas on the planet, you almost need a Government form to fill out to open a bag of chips.

It's impossible for me to believe that adding a few workstations to a network would be enough to bring down a large part of the European ATC system. It's also impossible to believe that a backup system they could instantly switch to or a backup power system weren't both in place, given the regulations that the EU would have for a data center.

My thought is that they got HACKED, and spent hours trying to fix whatever was done to them, and are terrified of telling the public just how vulnerable a sensitive system like Air Traffic Control can be.

Any thoughts?

a reply to: babybunnies

If it can be proven in a Court of British Law,, then there are avenues.
u could walk down.

a reply to: BobAthome I believe the incoming connection logs of the data center could probably be obtained under freedom of information act, if the data center is working exclusively under contract with the British Government?

a reply to: babybunnies

u really want to go down that rabbit hole,,remember under international Law Cyber Warfare IS considered one of the Acts of War against another Nation.

Deep whole.

a reply to: babybunnies

This morning, the "official story" was released, in which the outage was blamed on "too many workstations being added to the network to accommodate extra inquiries during the busy Christmas travel season".

They must have forgot to look at a calendar.

Or, they forgot what they did last year.

And the year before and the year before that.

If they added a new row of workstations, then maybe they added a new segment onto their network but forgot to set up the firewall filters, and traffic ended up ping-ponging between segments. Most corporations keep their LAN segmented with firewalls, so that if one segment has a computer network traffic problem it doesn't take down the whole network. They could have DDoS'ed themselves.

Every one of those display workstations is going to be issuing traffic location requests along with map data and other communications.

There was a massive DDos attack going on today (ATS was down for most of the day) so maybe they are connected?

There are a couple of threads on the ATS attack:

One of the threads

SkepticOverload's Thread

I think that you are correct here. I can't believe that we have an air traffic control system that cannot be backed up instantly. Were military flights grounded as well? If so, then for the duration British airspace was vulnerable. Or why did the powers that be need the skies clear...the mind boggles and something doesn't feel right

From what i remember the air traffic system is a right bodge and needs a proper sorting out but that costs money but having a 40 year old system creaking away like it is will always have the odd moment, probably a server hit its licensing cap for concurrent sessions and anyone else got stuffed

My Spider sense is tingling over this one. It could have just been an issue behind the scenes & all very legit, as problems go. The worrying thing is though, is that our airspace was vulnerable for whatever time it took to fix the problem.
I don't want to think something sinister is going on that we don't know about, but something tells me it is.

Also the trouble is, the media spin it so well that the general public will believe anything they're told. If the newspapers say the sky is yellow, people will believe it.

I could not help noticing the yellow sky in your avatar...

originally posted by: nonspecific
I could not help noticing the yellow sky in your avatar...

Yeah, now you mention it

I just can't believe that the EU doesn't require mandatory backup systems for a something as essential as air traffic control.

and in so far as saying "oh, maybe it was a section of the network they forgot to put a firewall up on", who are you kidding?

A high school computer science student, and likely your own kids if they're over 14, would know how to do this correctly.

All workstations, new or not, would have been behind the corporate firewall already in place in any case.

I think this is one of those things that happen that bears more scrutiny, but will probably get none because people are too busy looking at fake conspiracies, rather than real issues that could become real problems.

And yes, if an electronic attack did take place, it could be construed as an act of war.