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Winn Schwartau: Airlines in Cyber-Panic? PLUS Robert Steele on Criminal Irresponsibility UPDATE 2
Categories: Commerce,Corruption,Government,IO Impotency,Military
Winn Schwartau

Winn Schwartau

I REALLY believe in this. This is serious shit. W

Dear Airline:

If Safety is truly your First Concern, please turn off WiFi and Entertainment Systems until the potential cybersecurity problems are solved and passenger safety can be guaranteed.

As a security professional It astounds me that we are even questioning taking this simple step to remove the potential risk of a disaster while better solutions are designed. I have to severely question the wisdom of connecting the WiFi with Avionics Networks on a fly by wire machine hurtling 250 people at 530mph.

Your Customers, including me and my family and friends, sincerely hope that Safety comes before Profits.

Winn Schwartau, CEO, The Security Awareness Company

Phi Beta Iota: Below is the video and the article that summarizes the situation and also has some very intelligent (as well as some less intelligent) comments. The publisher is to be commended for allowing full spectrum comments to appear. Robert Steele’s comment is reproduced below.

FBI docs: Banned hacker says he commandeered a plane
Robert David Steele Vivas

Robert David Steele Vivas

ROBERT STEELE: I was a co-founder with Winn Schwartau of the Information Warfare Conference, and the opening speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth in 1994. I still remember some early papers from the US Air War College laying out very clearly how hackable all electronic systems are — indeed, NSA’s greatest non-secret is that the Chinese have been riding the electrical circuits into US Government computers that are not linked directly to the Internet. Bottom line — as I said on RT recently — is that the US Government has been criminally irresponsible in allowing industry to buy its way out of fundamental code level security — our entire cyber-world is a house of cards, and it is legislative corruption and corporate malfesance that makes it so. Although NSA was tasked in 1994 with protecting US commercial communications and computers, they chose instead to create infantile back-doors with the active connivance of the CEOs of Google, HP, Dell, Microsoft, and others (this is all a matter of public record). I have to wonder why those CEOs are not being made destitute by their betrayed stakeholders. Cars — and airplanes — can indeed be hacked. They can also be electromagentic pulse-bombed. I make these statements with the hope that some real investigative journalism will occur, and that the FBI will sound a proper alarm that leads Congress and the Executive to mandate a Manhattan scale project toward open source everything engineering (see my Open Source Everything Manifesto). If you live by lies, you die by lies. Time the public got upset about this. IMHO. #ElectoralReform – OpenPower is my proposed solution to the larger issue of lost integrity across all systems.

UPDATE 2 (Dumb BBC article + Related 2)

BBC Lite: FBI flight hacker claims queried by security experts

BBC: US airline to reward bug-finding hackers (but not on in-flight systems)

GAO-15-370 Air Traffic Control – FAA Needs a More Comprehensive Approach to Address Cybersecurity as Agency Transitions to NextGen

The Security Ledger: GAO Warns of Cyber Risks In-Flight

WIRED: United Will Reward People Who Flag Security Flaws—Sort Of

WIRED: Hacker’s Tweet Reignites Ugly Battle Over Security Holes

RELATED (Update 1)

Disappearing Malaysian Airlines 370 @ Phi Beta Iota

Our Lord of the Flies moment

See Especially:

Review: INFORMATION WARFARE–Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway

Review: Terminal Compromise

Review: WORM – The First Digital World War

Robert Steele: YouTube (4:01) RT Interview on NSA, Cyber-Vulernability, and Government Irresponsibility Since 1988

See Also:

Boston Brakes @ Phi Beta Iota

Cyber Security @ Phi Beta Iota

Winn Schwartau @ Phi Beta Iota

1990-2014 Steele on Specific Intelligence Reforms (Including Alarm on NSA from 1994 Onwards)