Get Yourself Some Whiteboard Markers … You Might Just Need Them
Bristol Airport Systems Go Down for over 50 hours
Published in
6 min readSep 16, 2018
As so Bristol Airport’s customer information systems were down from 3pm on Friday 14 September to 6am on Sunday 16 September.
Staff had to get out their whiteboard markers, and write-down the arrival and departure times of flights. Luckily, no flights were actually delayed, but it could have been much worse. The problem thus did not propagate to flight control systems, or into the rest of the airport infrastructure in the UK.
Within the EU NIS directive, organisations involved within critical national infrastructure — of which transport is a core part — can be fined, for the same levels as GDPR — for system downtimes.
With this type of problem there are typically three main causes:
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). This is where systems are targeted for a DoS attack, and where internal systems can be brought down or where the bandwidth of the network is throttled.
- Spear phishing credential stealing. This normally involves a spear phishing email and where a…
