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.
Following this disclosure, the service kept the users informed by sharing updates as they progressed with the investigations.
Nonetheless, their services faced disruptions as their team worked to fix the problem.
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.
Minutes after Flightradar24.com, Flightaware.com disclosed the same thing. The latter claims to be the world’s largest flight tracking data company.
Though, they were relatively fast in resolving the matter and were up again after a couple of hours.
Planefinder.net Also Under Attack
Shortly after Flightradar24.com and Flightaware.com disclosed the attack, another service Planefinder.net made a similar disclosure.
Like the other two services, Planefinder also went down following the attack.
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.