While Keifer Sutherland has been busy parading around in “giant feather boas” and headbutting soft-spoken fashion designers, it has emerged that a major plot point from this season’s 24 is–gasp!–vaguely plausible.
In the early hours of “day 7″ on the show, terrorists hackers breach a firewall and get inside something called the national infrastructure portal. There they do all kinds of nasty things, including mucking around with the air traffic control system and taking over all the planes in the sky and threatening to make them crash.
Earlier this year, we discussed this plot premise with a national security expert who was of the opinion that the U.S. air traffic control network is such a patchwork that it would be an unlikely target.
But according to a report released yesterday by the inspector general at the Department of Transportation, a few hackers have decided to have a go anyway–and apparently with some success. The civilian air-traffic computer system has been breached on “multiple” occasions, including one especially serious attack in Alaska. In that case hackers took over FAA computers, surfed within the network to steal an administrator’s password in Oklahoma and had the capability of stealing tens of thousands more access codes.
The report concluded that outsiders could get into the air traffic operations system–just like the bad guys on 24 did–by penetrating the administrative network. It identified 763 specific high risk vulnerabilities and more than 3,000 lower risk ones.
This really should be turned into a promo spot on Fox. Somehow we’re guessing it won’t be.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Perhaps because the consequences of having hackers getting onto ATC computers is still nothing like what this season of 24 depicted. Even if hackers could hijack ATC communications and try to crash planes here’s what would really happen:
ATC: “123 Heavy, clear final for runway two-one left.”
123: “Clear final two-one left, 123 Heavy.”
ATC: “456 Zulu, clear for takeoff runway three.”
456Z: “456 Zulu, clear takeoff.”
123: “Uh, this is 123 Heavy. I think I’ll go around until it’s actually safe for me to land.”
456Z: “This is 456 Zulu, good idea. Holding. So who’s the dumbass calling the air traffic, anyway?”
May 8th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Yeah, I think that goes without saying.
But enjoyed the skit.
-Jeb