At the last Airport Exchange Conference in November 2018, SITA, a well-known cybersecurity consultancy organisation, outlined its cooperation with Airbus, aimed to anticipate and detect cyber attacks.
SITA and Airbus set up a “Security Operation Centre”, which constantly monitors the activity of the information system for anomalies. When sensors detect an anomaly, they raise an alert. This is enquired upon and identified as either a real issue or a “false positive”.
SITA provides SOC to several airports in the UK (Manchester, East Midlands and Stansted).
The methodology was built on actual airport operations and the worst-case scenarios they could face. On this basis, the SITA team figured out how a cyber-attack could cause these scenarios. This is because a typical IT solution would not be helpful and any good solution would have to take into account the specificity of how airports work.