“Aviation cybersecurity is no longer just a technology challenge”

ACI Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec recently warned of the growing threat posed by AI-enabled cyberattacks in aviation, bringing into focus a challenge the industry can no longer defer. OneReg, the aviation compliance and safety software platform, says the response requires airports to think differently – not just about their individual defences, but about how the sector reduces systemic vulnerability.

Carly Waddleton, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at OneReg, identifies two priorities that should sit at the heart of the industry’s response: Reducing complexity, and using collective intelligence.

“For many airports, technology environments have grown organically over decades – legacy systems, standalone solutions and bespoke integrations layered on top of one another, each addressing a specific operational need. The cumulative effect is a fragmented landscape with a larger attack surface, more vendors to manage and more integration points where vulnerabilities can emerge. As AI-enabled threats become capable of identifying and exploiting those weaknesses at unprecedented speed, reducing that complexity is a cybersecurity strategy in its own right. Consolidating operational processes onto modern, unified platforms with strong security controls and continuous patching has become a security imperative, not merely an operational one.”

“Aviation has always recognised that safety improves when knowledge is shared. Cybersecurity should be no different. The threats facing airports today are rarely unique to a single organisation – the attack patterns observed at one airport are often highly relevant to many others. Instead of hundreds of airports independently responding to the same threats, the industry could collectively learn and adapt faster than attackers can evolve. The airports that succeed will be those participating in ecosystems that combine modern, resilient platforms with shared intelligence and collaborative learning.”