US Air Traffic Control System Is Riddled With Vulnerabilities

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday March 4, 2015 @05:28AM from the things-you-shouldn't-read-before-your-flight-today dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A recently released report (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office has revealed that despite some improvements, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still needs to quash significant security control weaknesses that threaten the agency's ability to ensure the safe and uninterrupted operation of the national airspace system (NAS). The report found that while the "FAA established policies and procedures for controlling access to NAS systems and for configuring its systems securely, and it implemented firewalls and other boundary protection controls to protect the operational NAS environment [...] a significant number of weaknesses remain in the technical controls—including access controls, change controls, and patch management—that protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its air traffic control systems."

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Re:Ya Think? by pete6677 · 2015-03-04 05:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

Is this why the entire nation's ATC system limped along at a severely reduced capacity when a single Chicago facility was taken offline for 3 weeks due to a single contractor cutting a few cables?
Re:Ya Think? by pete6677 · 2015-03-04 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

Getting everyone on the ground safely is the pilots' job. Keeping planes in the air safely is ATC's job.