Govt Confirms Seven Airports Affected By Cyberattack: Report

The Centre has confirmed that seven major airports across the country were affected by cyberattacks on Monday, NDTV reported. This includes the airport in Delhi, where flights approaching reported spoofing of global positioning system or GPS.

To ensure uninterrupted flight operations, India continues to maintain a Minimum Operating Network (MON) of ground-based navigation and surveillance systems—a redundancy model also used globally, the report added.

This network acts as a failsafe in case of satellite-based system failures.

Apart from Delhi, the airports in Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bengaluru were also affected. There were no flights, however, disrupted due to the GPS spoofing, as per the government.

The development comes a couple of days after flight operations globally were impacted due to a software-related fix required for Airbus A320 planes.

The issue had impacted around 388 flights in India on Saturday. However, by Sunday, all Indian airlines completed the software upgrade, which made the planes fit for resumption of commercial operations.

The software upgrades are being undertaken at the bases of the airlines in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

A day earlier, on Friday, the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) came out with an Emergency Airworthiness Directive regarding the potential issue. The European regulator said Airbus asked airline operators to install a serviceable Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC) in the impacted aircraft.