Free Republic

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...