The global aviation cybersecurity market is projected to grow from $10.07 billion in 2025 to $15.77 billion by 2032, driven by digital transformation and elevated cyber threats across airlines, airports, and aircraft systems—growing at a compound annual growth rate of 6.6%.
There are a few reasons why the industry is investing heavily into cybersecurity, according to a report from Coherent Market Insights:
Digital expansion: The surge in cloud services, IoT-enabled platforms, connected aircraft, and AI-driven systems expands the aviation attack surface, necessitating sophisticated cybersecurity solutions.
Escalating threat landscape: In 2025, ransomware assaults in aviation surged by 600% year-over-year, including 27 major incidents orchestrated by 22 ransomware groups between January 2024 and April 2025. Airlines and airports are responding with urgent cybersecurity upgrades.
Regulation and oversight: Heightened pressure from aviation regulators such as ICAO and the FAA is prompting organizations to embrace more advanced cybersecurity frameworks.
The report breaks it down by deployment, services, and security types (for 2025):
Deployment type: 72.7% of the market is cloud/hosted solutions.
Security type: Cloud security leads with 35.1% of market share.
Service type: Managed Security Solutions dominate with 67.8% share.
The implications for cybersecurity teams are fairly obvious, including cloud security, especially for SaaS and hybrid models. It's vital to secure configurations and monitor in these environments as a core focus.
The heavy reliance on managed services reflects a preference for outsourced, specialized cybersecurity capabilities in an increasingly complex threat environment.
In 2025, North America accounted for 33.7% of the global aviation cybersecurity revenue—a reflection of strong regulatory frameworks, advanced infrastructure, and proactive investments. Europe follows, propelled by GDPR compliance, aviation-specific cyber standards, and strategic R&D initiatives.
Suggested strategies for security leaders include in the following:
Prioritizing cloud security measures: Cloud/hosted solutions dominate, at 72.7%, so ensuring secure deployment and continuous monitoring via strong IAM, zero trust, and threat detection in cloud environments is essential.
Embracing managed security services: With nearly two-thirds of security functions outsourced, organizations should strengthen collaboration and vetting of MSSPs to ensure high operational resilience.
Leveraging AI for threat detection: As AI becomes integral to cybersecurity operations, combining AI-powered analytics with domain-specific expertise offers organizations a competitive defensive edge.
Navigating regulation proactively: Understand evolving regional and international aviation cybersecurity mandates to align internal controls and maintain compliance-driven resilience.
Allocating budget for high stakes: Given the dramatic rise in ransomware and other attacks, security investments can no longer be optional; they are foundational to operational continuity and passenger safety.
Col. Cedric Leighton, CNN Military Analyst; U.S. Air Force (Ret.); Chairman, Cedric Leighton Associates, LLC, offered his insights on keeping a vital industry secure:
"The aviation industry presents some unique cybersecurity challenges," Leighton said. "This industry, valued at between $760 billion and over $1 trillion, employs more than 86 million people worldwide. By itself, it represents a little less than 4 percent of global GDP, making it one of the most critical components of the global economy. That also makes it a key target for both state-sponsored and non-state nefarious cyber actors.
"The global aviation industry is afflicted with several key vulnerabilities. One of them is an aging infrastructure. Some air traffic control equipment is 60 years old; and even some of the newer equipment has reached the end of its operational lifecycle.
"Just like with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) in factories or power plants, the aviation sector's aging IT infrastructure is incredibly difficult to secure. This means that airlines, airports, and regulatory bodies like the FAA have to methodically plan for the integration of workable cybersecurity solutions that minimize operational downtime.
"Not all cyber vulnerabilities are under the direct control of an airline or an airports authority. One critical vulnerability is the GPS system. Some of its satellites are reaching the end of their service life, and the system itself is vulnerable to electronic jamming and spoofing. While improvements to the GPS system, making it more resistant to jamming and spoofing, are on the way, they can't get here fast enough. Commercial aviation is particularly vulnerable to GPS attacks, especially in times of heightened international tension. Flights into and out of Israel were impacted during recent tensions with Iran, as was at least one United Airlines flight as it flew over the Black Sea while en route to the U.S. from India.
"An attack on the GPS system could provide false positional data to an aircrew, and that could result in an aircraft deviating from its intended flight path, potentially crossing into denied territory such as a combat zone and putting passengers and the plane at risk of being shot down or running out of fuel.
"Ransomware has become a major problem for the aviation industry. Any time aviation data is made inaccessible, it impacts flight schedules, supply chains, and the entire air traffic control system. The cost of such a disruption can easily run into the billions."
Here are some additional thoughts from security vendor experts.
Krishna Vishnubhotla, VP of Product Strategy at Zimperium, said:
"As aviation operations increasingly depend on mobile devices, for flight crews, ground staff, and maintenance teams, these endpoints have become high-value targets. One global airline recently strengthened its mobile security posture after uncovering threats like malicious SMS links, risky Wi-Fi use, sideloaded apps, and OS vulnerabilities affecting employee devices.
"With more than 72% of aviation cybersecurity solutions now cloud-hosted and a growing reliance on managed services, it's critical that mobile security be treated as a foundational layer, providing on-device protection, continuous threat detection, and full visibility across mobile fleets to support operational resilience and regulatory compliance."
Trey Ford, Chief Strategy and Trust Officer at Bugcrowd, offered his "imperfect outsider view" of the aviation sector in several spheres of operations: booking/operations management, real-time operations, and flight management systems.
"Connected and smart technologies means accessible and vulnerable," Ford said. "The failure modes will be increasingly complicated, and the logging and insights we will have into post-facto issue analysis may be somewhat thin.
"The modern cockpit is far more connected than ever. Portable devices (phones, tablets, etc.) interface directly with the flight management system (FMS) or GPS platform for flight planning, routing, weather, and enroute amendments. Modern commercial aircraft are internet connected. We all expect these systems are for passengers, and imagine they are well isolated from the FMS systems.
"Real-time operations management systems, both airline and centralized systems, have seen issues impacting routing, planning, and logistics impacts for a variety of reasons. Complex systems, by definition, will have a variety of failure modes.
"Bookings and operations platforms, more so than the in-flight and operations platforms, will be accessible to far larger populations of users—employees, partners, and in many cases, the general public—making them far more accessible to threat actors and automated attacks.
"The only way to raise the resilience of these platforms is to maximize the population of researchers involved in testing these technologies—and doing so for many of these platforms will require a level of trust and specialized access."
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