97 of the world's 100 largest airports have massive cybersecurity risks

By Jonathan Greig for TechRepublic
Thursday, January 30, 2020

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On the flipside, dozens of airports failed all of ImmuniWeb's tests by having vulnerable web and mobile applications, misconfigured public clouds, Dark Web exposure or code repository leaks. ImmuniWeb decided to look into airport cybersecurity after the topic was highlighted during the 2020 World Economic Forum. In its own report, released on January 22, the WEF called for airports to address emerging cybersecurity challenges.

"Given how many people and organizations entrust their data and lives to international airports every day, these findings are quite alarming," said Ilia Kolochenko, CEO and founder of ImmuniWeb.

"Being a frequent flyer, I frankly prefer to travel via the airports that do care about their cybersecurity. Cybercriminals may well consider attacking the unwitting air hubs to conduct chain attacks of the travelers or cargo traffic, as well as aiming attacks at the airports directly to disrupt critical national infrastructure," Kolochenko said.

When it comes to security for main websites, just three airports received an A+ and only 15 managed to score an A in ImmuniWeb's report. Nearly one in four airport websites received an F grade, meaning they were using outdated software with known and exploitable security vulnerabilities in the CMS systems like WordPress or web components like jQuery. Some of the websites even had several vulnerable components. ImmuniWeb researchers found that 97% of the websites are deploying outdated web software, 24% have known and exploitable vulnerabilities while another 76% are not compliant with GDPR. Nearly 25% have no SSL encryption or use now-obsolete SSLv3. Read Full Article