Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., has called on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to work with the Department of Transportation to perform a joint review of cyber vulnerabilities facing the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Mission system and other air travel platforms following an outage of NOTAM.
Torres wrote a letter to CISA Director Jen Easterly, a previous Wash100 awardee, Thursday asking the agency about policies and investments that could be made to protect air travel systems from cyberthreat actors.
“At a time when cyberattacks are rising in both scope and sophistication, modernizing the cybersecurity of air travel must be a priority for the federal government,” the letter reads.
The temporary disruptions in the function of the NOTAM system, which provides pilots with real-time alerts on safety conditions, led to thousands of flight delays and cancellations at major U.S. carriers Wednesday.
FAA said in a statement Wednesday that a corrupted file had resulted in the NOTAM outage.
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,” the FAA said.
