Free Republic

MIAMI (CBS12) -- A flight from Paris is being held on the tarmac at Miami International Airport due to a suspicious item. Miami-Dade Police are investigating the item on board American Airlines flight 63 from Paris. There are 214 people on board. The search by the bomb squad is not impacting other operations at the airport. The plane has been moved to a remote area of the airport for the investigation, according to Miami-Dade Aviation Department Communications Director Greg Chin.

At least six flights were impacted by threats at airports in New York, New Jersey and Boston today, according to airlines and law enforcement. JFK Airport: An Air France plane was escorted to JFK Airport in New York City this morning after an anonymous threat was made against the flight, law enforcement officials told ABC News. The FBI said the plane has since been checked and cleared with "no incidents or hazards reported on board the flight by either the passengers or its crew."

One of the world’s foremost experts on counter-threat intelligence within the cybersecurity industry, who blew the whistle on vulnerabilities in airplane technology systems in a series of recent Fox News reports, has become the target of an FBI investigation himself. Chris Roberts of the Colorado-based One World Labs, a security intelligence firm that identifies risks before they're exploited, said two FBI agents and two uniformed police officers pulled him off a United Airlines Boeing 737-800 commercial flight Wednesday night just after it landed in Syracuse, and spent the next four hours questioning him about cyberhacking of planes. The FBI interrogation...

A worst-case scenario is that a terrorist with a laptop would sit among the passengers and take control of the airplane using its passenger Wi-Fi, said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee who requested the investigation. "That's a serious vulnerability, and FAA should work quickly" to fix the problem, DeFazio said. The avionics in a cockpit operate as a self-contained unit and aren't connected to the same system used by passengers to watch movies or work on their laptops. But as airlines update their systems with Internet-based networks, it's not uncommon for Wi-Fi...

The finding by the Government Accountability Office presents chilling new scenarios for passengers. The report doesn't suggest it would be easy to do, or very likely. But it points out that as airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration attempt to modernize planes and flight tracking with Internet-based technology, attackers have a new vulnerability they could exploit. The avionics in a cockpit operate as a self-contained unit and aren't connected to the same system used by passengers to watch movies or work on their laptops. But as airlines update their systems with Internet-based networks, it's not uncommon for Wi-Fi systems to...