Indian Second Largest Airline SpiceJet Faced Cyber Attack, Hundreds of Passengers Stranded

Because of a ransomware attack that disrupted SpiceJet airlines' morning flight departures on Wednesday (25 May), hundreds of its passengers were left stranded at various airports, hours of delay causing huge economical loss.

The company confirmed that on 24 May night, its system was attacked by ransomware that led to the slow departure of flights the next day morning. SpiceJet tweeted a statement said that some of its systems hit with cyber attack and slowed down morning flights. But its IT team has contained the situation and the operations were normal.

However, passengers still stuck at airports waiting in hunger and thirst, and informed by the ground staff that“the server had gone done”without other explanations, sparking widespread customers anger. One of the passengers, Devendra Panwar commented under the official statement with“no help at airport”. Other passengers also complained the same problems.

SpiceJet hasn’t disclosed any details of the cyber attack as of now. The resource and reason of this ransomware attack remain unknown.

SpiceJet is the second-largest airline in India owning 102 aircrafts to serve more than 60 destinations. Employing over 14,000 staff, SpiceJet occupies 15% of the Indian market share. This cyberattack affected numerous of passengers across India and abroad, therefore bringing about substantial financial losses.

This is not the first time that SpiceJet has ran into a cyberattack. In January 2020, SpiceJet confirmed a data bleach incident in which an unauthorized individual gained access to a database backup file on one of the airline's insecure servers, which containing unencrypted information of 1,200,000 passengers including their names, phone numbers, flight information and other personal information.

 Another cyberattack that affected the flight transfer was Canadian Sunwing Airline which  resulted in a week delay and days of passengers’retention.

Cybersecurity threats are nothing new with the boom of digital and information technology, now any industry can be a target of cybercriminals. Data links to the intangible and vulnerable asset of a company, which is especially true with airline industry mentioned above inasmuch as data security runs through everything from passengers’ information, flight transfer, and airplane operation control, so, the consequence of data breach can be serious.

What can airline companies do to prevent such ransomware attacks?

For airline companies, a strengthened IT system with detection of ransomware or malware is necessary. And a periodical audit of the security system is considered crucial because loopholes always exist, they would catch you surprised if you skip them.

However, whatever you do and how well you prepare for the accidents, cyber threats often bring in the unexpected. Thus, having a systematic and complete disaster recovery plan tops the list if you want to prevent data loss caused by cybercrimes or operational errors. Before that, remember to back up in advance. Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a backup software that automates the whole backup process after the custom configurations to help airlines backup beforehand.

For better protection of airlines data, Vinchin Backup & Recovery transfers backup data via LAN-Free mode or multithread transmission to improve the speed without taking up the bandwidth. The backups stored in Vinchin server will be secured by the real-time I/O detector that denies any unauthorized visits. The software supports the construction of remote DR center by copying the offsite backup copies to remote sites. These copies allow data to be highly recoverable when things go wrong in the major production environment.

Anti-ransomware protection is a theme that is never out of date, on the contrary, it’s getting more tropical. The victim lists are getting longer and they are a living reminder of the necessity building a backup and recovery plan. So, if you are worried about the safety of your critical data, please act now and back up. This will save your data if ransomware hits.