A cyberattack involving ransomware has caused flight display screens to fail for a period of over three days at Bristol airport, the ninth-busiest airport in the U.K.
The outage, Bristol Airport spokesman James Gore confirmed, was due to the ransomware attack. Further, he insisted that no ransomware had been paid to get the systems up and running again.
“We believe there was an online attempt to target part of our administrative systems and that required us to take a number of applications offline as a precautionary measure, including the one that provides our data for flight information screens,” Gore told the BBC. “That was done to contain the problem and avoid any further impact on more critical systems.”
We are currently experiencing technical problems with our flight information screens. Flights are unaffected and details of check-in desks, boarding gates, and arrival/departure times will be made over the public address system. Additional staff are on hand to assist passengers
— Bristol Airport (@BristolAirport) September 14, 2018
While no flights are understood to have been disrupted but information screens at the airport first went dark on Friday, September 14., leaving airport personnel to resort to a combination of increased PA announcements and hand-written status updates on whiteboards to provide flight information.
It’s all fun and games at #BristolAirport!? lets hope they don’t run out of paper? pic.twitter.com/nYefn9Aqr4
— Julieanne McMahon (@julieanne_mc) September 14, 2018
“A number of processes, including the application providing data for flight information screens in the terminal were taken offline purely as a precautionary measure, while the problem was contained and to avoid any further impact,” the airport added in a statement.
Come 04:30 A.M local time on Sunday, Bristol Airport revealed it had restored live flight information on some digital screens installed in “key locations”, including arrivals and departures.
We are grateful to passengers for their patience while we have been working to resolve issues with flight information this weekend. Digital screens are now live in arrivals and departures. Work will continue to restore complete site-wide coverage as soon as possible.
— Bristol Airport (@BristolAirport) September 16, 2018
Image credit: Pexels.