Real-time Flight Tracking Services Suffered Cyber Attack

Prominent flight tracking services, Flightradar24, Flightaware, and Planefinder suffered a cyber attack recently. The brief attacks disrupted the services’ functioning, rendering them unusable for hours.

Flight Tracking Services Under Cyber Attack

Reportedly, the two real-time flight tracking services, Flightradar24.com and Flightaware.com, fell prey to a cyber attack. While both the sites disclosed the incidents independent of each other, the timing of the attacks looked the same.

Flightradar24.com disclosed about the service disruptions via a tweet from their official account. They even explained it to be the third incident within two days.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1310661019405086720
- flightradar24

Following this disclosure, the service kept the users informed by sharing updates as they progressed with the investigations.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1310731331777818626
- flightradar24

Nonetheless, their services faced disruptions as their team worked to fix the problem.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1310776883823423488
- flightradar24

Though, they made it clear that the attack didn’t involve any breach of data. Nor did it affect the customers in any way. It was merely aimed at service disruption.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1310780296493662208
- flightradar24

Minutes after Flightradar24.com, Flightaware.com disclosed the same thing. The latter claims to be the world’s largest flight tracking data company.

https://twitter.com/flightaware/status/1310674341403779072
- flightaware

Though, they were relatively fast in resolving the matter and were up again after a couple of hours.

https://twitter.com/flightaware/status/1310709585204916224
- flightaware

Planefinder.net Also Under Attack

Shortly after Flightradar24.com and Flightaware.com disclosed the attack, another service Planefinder.net made a similar disclosure.

https://twitter.com/planefinder/status/1310880988415823873
- planefinder

Like the other two services, Planefinder also went down following the attack.

https://twitter.com/planefinder/status/1310899235664146432
- planefinder

However, while the other two services are back online, Planefinder.net was still down at the time of writing this article. Anyone accessing the site would get an “Error 502 Bad gateway” prompt.

It isn’t clear why and how the services were attacked, that too, in a trail. What seems, for now, is that all the services suffered a coordinated denial of service attack. While users’ data probably remained unaffected, the attackers directly hit the services’ functions.

Though, none of the three have officially disclosed anything about the exact nature of the attack, timelines, and other precise details.

In 2018, Flightradar24.com suffered a data breach, following which, it had to reset customers’ passwords.

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://latesthackingnews.com/2020/10/01/real-time-flight-tracking-services-suffered-cyber-attack/