Since the start of last year, major airlines including United, American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue have all seen flights delayed or canceled due to on-the-ground computer issues.
And while none of the outages have been linked to deliberate sabotage, it's likely that hackers do probe aviation systems looking for potential vulnerabilities, whether in ticketing systems, air traffic control networks, or computer systems onboard planes, experts say.
"We don’t have a lot [of hacker attempts] in the airline systems yet where they’ve been successful," says Mickey Roach, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who works with cybersecurity issues. "We know that they’re trying."
