Prominent flight tracking services, Flightradar24, Flightaware, and Planefinder suffered a cyber attack recently. The brief attacks disrupted the services’ functioning, rendering them unusable for hours.
Flight Tracking Services Under Cyber Attack
Reportedly, the two real-time flight tracking services, Flightradar24.com and Flightaware.com, fell prey to a cyber attack. While both the sites disclosed the incidents independent of each other, the timing of the attacks looked the same.
Flightradar24.com disclosed about the service disruptions via a tweet from their official account. They even explained it to be the third incident within two days.
⚠️ For the third time in two days Flightradar24 is under attack. Our engineers are working to mitigate the attack as quickly as possible and we hope to be back tracking flights soon. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience. Updates to follow in thread.
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 28, 2020
Following this disclosure, the service kept the users informed by sharing updates as they progressed with the investigations.
Work continues to mitigate the effects of the attack on our systems. Our team is working as quickly as possible to return our services to 100%. We will provide additional updates in this thread when new information is available.
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 29, 2020
Nonetheless, their services faced disruptions as their team worked to fix the problem.
Attacks on our systems continue and while we were able to bring services back for a short time, significant instability due to the sustained attacks has forced us to refocus our efforts to mitigate them. As a result, Flightradar24 remains unavailable to all users at this time.
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 29, 2020
Though, they made it clear that the attack didn’t involve any breach of data. Nor did it affect the customers in any way. It was merely aimed at service disruption.
Hi Ashley, no, this attack is focused on denying access to our services. Personal information is not involved.
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 29, 2020
Minutes after Flightradar24.com, Flightaware.com disclosed the same thing. The latter claims to be the world’s largest flight tracking data company.
We wanted to let you know that we're working to fix interruptions in service on https://t.co/rgfIe0y8jU in the last 24 hours. We're sorry for any problems this might have caused.
— FlightAware (@flightaware) September 28, 2020
Though, they were relatively fast in resolving the matter and were up again after a couple of hours.
At this time we are no longer seeing network instability and all services are functioning normally. We will continue to monitor and open a new incident if problems reoccur.
— FlightAware (@flightaware) September 28, 2020
Planefinder.net Also Under Attack
Shortly after Flightradar24.com and Flightaware.com disclosed the attack, another service Planefinder.net made a similar disclosure.
There may be issues accessing Plane Finder at the moment. It seems it's our turn to have our systems attacked. Our team are working hard to restore normal service. Please bear with us, we will provide updates as we have them.
— Plane Finder (@planefinder) September 29, 2020
Like the other two services, Planefinder also went down following the attack.
If you're having issues accessing Plane Finder this morning, thank you for your patience. We are working hard to counter the attack we are under and will bring Plane Finder back to full service as soon as we can.
— Plane Finder (@planefinder) September 29, 2020
However, while the other two services are back online, Planefinder.net was still down at the time of writing this article. Anyone accessing the site would get an “Error 502 Bad gateway” prompt.
It isn’t clear why and how the services were attacked, that too, in a trail. What seems, for now, is that all the services suffered a coordinated denial of service attack. While users’ data probably remained unaffected, the attackers directly hit the services’ functions.
Though, none of the three have officially disclosed anything about the exact nature of the attack, timelines, and other precise details.
In 2018, Flightradar24.com suffered a data breach, following which, it had to reset customers’ passwords.
