Flights across Europe were disrupted over the weekend after a cyberattack on aerospace and defense giant Collins Aerospace affected critical airport operations, including passenger processing systems at London Heathrow and several other major hubs. The incident highlights the fragility of aviation's reliance on shared vendors, where a single outage can ripple across airlines and entire countries.
According to cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont, who confirmed the attribution on Mastodon, the disruption was caused by HardBit ransomware, a strain known for tailoring ransom demands to a victim's cyber insurance coverage. The attack triggered a multinational investigation, with U.K. authorities making an arrest just days later.
HardBit emerged in October 2022 and quickly stood out from other ransomware groups due to its unique extortion tactics: criminals were willing to adjust ransom demands based on a victim's cyber insurance coverage. While the ransomware has not maintained a public "leak site" like many of its counterparts, it remains a dangerous threat, encrypting victim systems and claiming to exfiltrate sensitive data. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) confirmed that the outages at several major airports were the result of ransomware, though it did not provide further technical details.
On Wednesday, the BBC reported that the U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested a man in his forties in West Sussex in connection with the Collins Aerospace attack. The suspect, taken into custody on Tuesday evening, has since been released on conditional bail. Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, called the arrest "a positive step," but stressed that the investigation remains in its early stages. He warned that cybercrime is "a persistent global threat that continues to cause significant disruption to the U.K." and emphasized the agency's commitment, alongside partners at home and abroad, to reducing that threat in order to protect the public.
Experts note that while an arrest marks important progress, it is only the beginning of a long process. Andy Bennett, CISO at Apollo Information Systems, pointed out that tracking down and apprehending a threat actor is a significant achievement, but "an arrest is just a milestone in the long process of actually getting to trial and obtaining a conviction," which can often take years.
The Collins Aerospace incident underscores the ripple effects of attacks on widely-used vendors. Even when airlines' and airports' own systems are uncompromised, reliance on third-party providers can lead to major operational disruption. According to Kirsten Maley, Director of Claims at Cowbell, "operational outages increasingly originate at vendors that serve many customers simultaneously. For airports and airlines, that means critical passenger-processing functions can be impacted even if their own networks are uncompromised."
Maley advised that organizations should take specific steps now to prepare for such disruptions. These include mapping business-critical dependencies such as check-in, payments, and logistics, requiring vendors to provide 24/7 incident contacts and contractual breach-notice SLAs, and regularly testing manual fallbacks. She also recommended keeping immutable or offline backups, verifying restore times quarterly, hardening identity and email controls with MFA and monitoring for credential theft, and running joint tabletop exercises across legal, operations, and PR teams.
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Experts warn that Europe's interconnected aviation and economic infrastructure magnifies the impact of a single point of failure. Agnidipta Sarkar, Chief Evangelist at ColorTokens, said the Collins Aerospace case illustrates how Europe's operational advantages come with systemic risks: "A single point of failure, whether through a cyberattack, technical failure, or physical damage, can cascade across multiple countries and sectors simultaneously."
Sarkar emphasized the importance of strengthening defenses through zero-trust architecture, least-privilege and deny-by-default policies, and rapid isolation playbooks. He urged organizations to integrate micro-segmentation into existing cybersecurity investments, adopt passwordless credential systems for suppliers to prevent misuse, and augment defenses with deception technology that can lure attackers into honeypots. In his view, the disruptions show that "the world cannot tolerate incidents like what Collins Aerospace did to the European air traffic," and that defenders must remain "breach ready."
While the U.K. arrest is a significant development, the Collins Aerospace attack highlights a troubling pattern: ransomware operators striking critical suppliers and causing outsized disruptions. HardBit, with its history of tailoring demands to insurance limits, reinforces why organizations are advised never to disclose coverage details.
The key takeaway is clear: supply chain resilience must be prioritized. Organizations need to identify dependencies, test fallback processes, and prepare for rapid restoration without paying ransoms. The Collins Aerospace incident is another reminder that attackers remain highly adaptive, but with planning, organizations can build resilience against even the most disruptive ransomware campaigns.