The White House Is Refusing To Rule Out A ‘Nefarious’ Cyberattack On The FAA

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Wednesday that a cyberattack was not ruled out as the cause of a massive system outage that grounded all aircraft in the United States earlier in the day, raising new concerns among analysts and officials about vulnerabilities that could cripple America’s critical infrastructure.

“We’re not prepared to rule that out,” Buttigieg told MSNBC

when asked if domestic or foreign actors could have disrupted the FAA system that sends safety information to pilots known as Notices to Airmen, or NOTAM.

“There is no direct indication of any type of external or nefarious activity,” he added regarding the cyberattack , noting that the FBI and, at his direction, the FAA are investigating the cause.

However, the secretary emphasized one of the key unanswered questions: “How is it possible for there to be this level of disruption?”

As of Wednesday morning, more than 4,000 flights had been delayed and more than 600 had been cancelled due to a more than an hour-long outage in the system that disseminates information to pilots about issues with other aviation systems, upcoming events with the potential to disrupt traffic, such as planned military exercises or runway blockages. The system first failed at 2 a.m. Eastern time, prompting the FAA to order a halt to all domestic flights until 9 a.m.

At the time Buttigieg spoke, flights were slowly resuming. However, the gravity of the total seizure of commercial air traffic in the United States prompted many with extensive experience defending against American adversaries to express new concerns.

“The airline national stoppage may or may not be a cyberattack,” retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, the former top officer for operations in Europe, wrote on Twitter with an accompanying picture showing the grounded flights, “but even if it is not, it certainly shows us what one could look like. Excellent wake-up call.”

Former US intelligence analyst John Hultquist, now with private intelligence firm Mandiant, expressed doubt about a “sinister cyber plot” as the cause of Wednesday’s outage, but issued a dire warning.

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“If you’re looking for cybersecurity angles, I think this is it,” he tweeted. “We live in an increasingly complex, interconnected system prone to unanticipated consequences and cascading failures.”

On Wednesday, Buttigieg focused specifically on the system’s redundancies, which, help protect all commercial traffic, and why they failed.

“We need to understand why, despite all of that redundancy, it still rose to the point where there had to be a ground stop lasting about an hour and a half and the kind of delays he saw,” he said.

Congress is currently conducting a five-year review of the FAA’s operations, and Buttigieg emphasised the importance of reviewing the systems, as well as other flaws that allowed severe winter storms to strand hundreds of thousands of air passengers during the holidays.

The United Nations Civil Aviation Organization had already begun an effort to redesign international systems that allow for urgent communication with pilots in order to use clearer language and more reliable networks.