Sunwing Airline Delays 188 Flights Due to Cyberattack on Its Provider

Canadian airline company Sunwing Airlines had been forced to delay 188 flights due to the cyber attack on its third-party provider on 17 April, disrupting plans of thousands of passengers.

The provider, Chicago-based Airline Choice, offers passenger management software solutions for airlines, ground handlers and airports, confirming that a “data security event” hit the company on Sunday and compromised its server networks.

Sunwing staff had to manually process flights and fill in boarding passes without Airline Choice’s check-in system, leaving significant delays at airports in sun destinations and a crowd of customers stranded, with little information about when the incident will be resolved.

Sunwing Airline said it was back to normal operations on 22 April, but the system-wide failure took time to restore and that would be “slower than usual” and slight delays. Yet still, passengers affected by the outage were forced to cancel holiday reservations for the days of waiting. For the passengers delayed over three hours, Sunwing promised to compensate and allow them change travel dates without penalty flying between April 19 and April 22.

This incident, according to cyber security expert Ritesh Kotak, is an example of why businesses need a backup plan when it comes to the technology they rely on. “What happens when the lights get cancelled,” he said. “How do you ensure you have business continuity and ensure that your processes are safe and secure and business can actually continue?” Obviously, the company didn't have proper plans in place, and as a fallout, this delay was extended even further.

How to prevent ransomware? Or protect yourself from cybercrime? Cyber attack today is getting worse and more complicated, making the answers urgent and indispensable as well. Learning lessons from climbing numbers of victims is a must. But what can be done to ease the problem?

Just as the cybercrime cannot be solved overnight, so the route forward is by small steps, beginning with building a solid IT system. Keep software and systems up to date in case the hackers exploit the weaknesses. Putting the network behind a firewall is one of the effective means to defend from cyber threats. Having different strong passwords setup for every application in use and changing them periodically is another precaution. Also, access to systems needs to be limited with double authentication. But above all, a complete anti-ransomware strategy cannot carry out without backup and recovery. Vinchin Backup & Recovery is the reliable virtual machine data protection software designed for backup and recovery to protect important business data from cybercrimes.

1.     Precaution: smart backup strategies

To efficiently prevent cyberattack, the first thing to do is to implement frequent backups. Vinchin Backup & Recovery has customized full backup, differential backup and incremental backup strategies with smart scheduling and retention policy, which can suffice for different kinds of backup needs.

2.     Protection in the process: anti-ransomware technology

Vinchin Backup & Recovery enables unique real-time I/O monitoring of Vinchin encrypted backups technology to protect backup data stored in Vinchin backup server. Unauthorized applications' requests to modify backup data will be immediately denied by the smart detection. So, the visit will be rejected if ransomware or other malware tries to modify the backup. Thus, the backups will be immune from ransomware infection and ready as an understudy if anything happens.

3.     Just in case: fast recovery after cyberattacks

To avoid data loss and defend against data breach, Vinchin Backup & Recovery follows the 3-2-1 backup rule. In addition to on-premises scheduled backups, the solution provides offsite backup copy and archive to cloud for effective disaster recovery. You can either use offsite backup copies to instantly restore the business at remote production environment, or retrieve the backups from the cloud and restore them to the primary production system, reducing downtime and financial loss with high data integrity guaranteed.

One cannot emphasize enough the measures against cyber security threats for nobody wants to be a radical case for warning others about the importance of backup and recovery. Backup plays an essential role in the war against cyberattacks. Without it, we might leave ourselves high and dry but we could have a proper procedure when internet threats hit.