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Aviation Cyber Threats Force Airports to Share or Sink.

For decades, airports have worried about everything from fog and fuel prices to volcanic ash clouds and the odd wayward drone. Now they have a new headache, keeping executives awake at 3 am, cyber criminals armed with artificial intelligence.

And according to aviation compliance platform OneReg, the industry’s traditional approach of every airport fighting its own cyber battles behind closed doors simply won’t cut it anymore.

The warning follows comments from ACI Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec, who recently sounded the alarm over the growing sophistication of AI-enabled cyberattacks targeting aviation infrastructure.

If that wasn’t unsettling enough, OneReg says many airports may already be making life easier for attackers.

The culprit? Complexity.

Carly Waddleton, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at OneReg

Most airports haven’t been built overnight. Their technology certainly hasn’t. Instead, systems have been bolted on, upgraded, patched, integrated, and occasionally held together with what can only be politely described as digital sticky tape.

A booking platform here. A compliance system is there. Legacy software nobody dares switch off because “Frank from IT retired in 2017 and only he understood it”.

Sound familiar?

Carly Waddleton, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of OneReg, says that sprawling technology estates are becoming a significant security risk.

“For many airports, technology environments have grown organically over decades – legacy systems, standalone solutions and bespoke integrations layered on top of one another, each addressing a specific operational need,” Waddleton said.

“The cumulative effect is a fragmented landscape with a larger attack surface, more vendors to manage and more integration points where vulnerabilities can emerge.”

And with AI-powered attackers now capable of identifying weak spots faster than ever before, those cracks in the digital armour are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

“As AI-enabled threats become capable of identifying and exploiting those weaknesses at unprecedented speed, reducing that complexity is a cybersecurity strategy in its own right,” Waddleton said.

“Consolidating operational processes onto modern, unified platforms with strong security controls and continuous patching has become a security imperative, not merely an operational one.”

In short, fewer moving parts generally mean fewer opportunities for cyber crooks to sneak through the side door.

But technology is only half the equation.

OneReg believes the aviation sector needs to embrace the same collaborative mindset that transformed airline safety over the past half-century.

After all, aviation has always been remarkably good at sharing lessons when safety is at stake. A near miss in Frankfurt today can improve procedures in Sydney tomorrow.

Cybersecurity, says Waddleton, should work exactly the same way.

“Aviation has always recognised that safety improves when knowledge is shared. Cybersecurity should be no different,” she said.

“The threats facing airports today are rarely unique to a single organisation – the attack patterns observed at one airport are often highly relevant to many others.”

Instead of hundreds of airports reinventing the wheel individually every time a new cyber threat emerges, OneReg argues that the sector should pool intelligence and learn collectively.

“The airports that succeed will be those participating in ecosystems that combine modern, resilient platforms with shared intelligence and collaborative learning,” Waddleton added.

The reality is sobering. Cyber criminals collaborate, exchange tactics, and move at lightning speed. Aviation, an industry built on cooperation, may now need to apply that same philosophy to cyberspace.

Because in the age of artificial intelligence, keeping quiet about cyber threats could prove far more dangerous than sharing them.