Cyber Attack forces flight cancellations in Alaska in the holiday season

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Christmas 2019 looks jinxed to some of the people who were planning to fly out of Alaska as a large scale cyber attack is reported to have made the authorities at Ravn Air Group to cancel flights in the whole of Alaskan region.

As per the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders, a malicious cyberattack is said to have occurred on the RavnAir database on Friday, December 20th, 2019 leading to flight cancellations from Saturday morning.

Highly placed sources say that a malware attack was launched on turbo-powered regional airliner the De Havilland Canada DHC-8 aircraft’s( known as Dash 8) maintenance & backup system and then malware spread into the network of RavnAir Alaska’s Dash 8 flight systems within no time.

As it was a holiday season many of the travelers who reached the airport were severely disappointed with the fact that the airliner has canceled most of the state connecting flights.

FBI and the local law enforcement authority at Anchorage, Alaska, United States were informed about the incident.

News is out that PenAir Flights and RavnAir Connecting flights remained unaffected by the cyber attack.

On a collective note, over 682 passengers who were supposed to travel on a flight via RavnAir had to cancel their journeys or look for alternatives to reach their holiday destinations. More than a dozen flights remained canceled on Sat, Sun, and Monday.

Note 1- The weather conditions at the airport were also not so conducive for the flights to take off and adding to the dismay of the travelers was the flight cancellations that happened due to cyber attack.

Note 2- The nature of the cyber attack is yet to be confirmed by the airliner.

Note 3- Corvus Airline operates the airline services on the name of Ravn Air Group from Anchorage and happens to be the primary hub for Ravn, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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