Overview

• The FBI confirmed on June 27–28 that the Scattered Spider hacking collective is expanding its campaign to include airlines and transportation companies
• Google’s Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 have observed multiple intrusions in the aviation and transport sectors matching Scattered Spider’s social engineering tactics
• WestJet’s June 12 breach and Hawaiian Airlines’ June 23 incident are both under federal and private investigation without any impact on flight safety or schedules
• American Airlines is grappling with an unexplained IT outage that authorities are examining for possible links to the group’s sector-by-sector attacks
• Industry alerts recommend that aviation firms tighten help desk identity verification and adopt phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication to block future breaches