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Southwest Network Security failure grounds flights and are now delayed
Southwest Airlines said flight delays Tuesday morning were the result of “data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” a problem that led to a brief ground stop. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground stop for Southwest Airlines flights after earlier issuing the order, citing “equipment issues.” In a tweet at 11:35 a.m. Southwest said it had resumed operations. “Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was… (www.cnn.com) Plus d'info...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
Norm must be rolling in his grave .........
From the Cyber Security side of the world it looks like the failure of a single piece of hardware, a firewall. With no redundancy? The southwest Executives have IT on such a tight budget they do not have critical hardware redundancy. The Executives need to be fired. How do you run a large airline without resilient systems? After their Christmas melt down there is no blaming this on workers and hardware.
Agreed. After the Christmas debacle, word came out that they had cheaped out on their computer systems to pay bonuses and hoard profits rather than reinvest in data systems first. This whole thing is a self-inflicted wound.
I've used cloud development before in admittedly a small web application for a small insurance company, but I can say with authority that between Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM, there are plenty of dynamically scalable (based on demand), optional redundancy and disaster recovery features in all of them. All you have to do is figure out if the cost is worth it and the cloud vendor is reliable and secure. I hope Southwest is already using some kind of cloud-based infrastructure and thinks long and hard about paying extra for redundancy and DR if they aren't already doing so.
Exactly right. A single firewall should never bring down mission critical operations. Ever. Any IT budget for a firewall in a mission critical situation should be for two firewalls, multi-homed switches and multi-homed power supplies.
You know.. we don’t know. It could’ve been a human error that meant to push a firmware upgrade out to the test side for testing and it hit the production side instead. Obviously not that I know except I work in IT and these things happen.
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