Cyberattack link to FAA outage dismissed by White House

The White House has announced that the Federal Aviation Administration outage on Wednesday that disrupted all domestic air travel departures was due to an overnight outage to its Notice to Air Missions system and is not linked to a cyberattack "at this point," SecurityWeek reports. All airlines have been ordered by the FAA around 7:15 a.m. Eastern to postpone all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern as the agency sought to validate flight and safety information integrity but air traffic operations gradually resumed around 8:15 a.m. Eastern. Ground stop was completely lifted at 8:50 a.m. Eastern. Despite having no evidence of a cyberattack, the Transportation Department has been tasked by President Joe Biden to launch a probe aimed at delving into the cause of the outage, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a tweet. Mandiant Threat Intelligence Vice President John Hultquist also dismissed the cyberattack angle as the cause of the outage. "I really doubt you'll find some sinister cyber plot at the root of this FAA thing, but if you're looking for cybersecurity angles I think it's this: we live in an increasingly complex, interdependent system that is prone to unforeseen consequences and cascading failures," said Hultquist.