Boeing’s Jeppesen subsidiary hit with potential ransomware attack | Hacker News Reader

Boeing’s Jeppesen subsidiary hit with potential ransomware attack

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39 pointsjjwiseman13 comments

This is big - Jeppesen products are central to a lot of airline and flight ops.

Somewhere some old, crotchety CFI that still uses paper charts and demands their students do too is laughing "I TOLD YOU SO!"

That would be me. I use the electronics but I have some selected paper charts just in case. Saved my bacon once.

Are you updating these regularly or do you just accept out-of-date copies as backups? I kept local backup VFR charts on paper until they increased the update frequency, now it’s just way too much paper to justify.

I update them when they actually change. The version and last-updated date are printed on the bottom left corner. (Not the date on the side; that's the volume date, not the chart date.) For example one procedure I use frequently has "Orig-D 20DEC21" printed in the bottom left corner. If your electronic version stamp matches the one on the paper copy, nothing about the procedure has changed, even if a new volume has been published.

"My E6B Flight Computor can't get hacked!"

I went on site in mmm 2018? to help them deploy some APM for the backend of their nav, maps and scheduling products. It was - like much of that kind of software- a mix of exceedingly awesome stuff with craptacularly integrated and poorly integrated systems, with ancient dependencies and strange feeds everywhere. In other words pretty normal stuff in corporate world, and the kind of systems that are hard to un-ransom...

Tough to imagine Boeing being anything other than a basket of legacy crap with some super interesting innovations in spite of everything.

It feels like another one of those systems that’s destined to languish, like a lot of other highly regulated industries these days. Like, I would never take a job at a medium to large size bank these days because now it’s really about how old version of Java I would have to deal with by doing so.

I’m in a regulated industry and using JDK 17.

Boeing buys a lot of smaller technology companies/products and folds them into various subsidiaries (like Jeppesen). This brings a constant source of innovation to the enterprise, and means there are lots of interesting things going on in the broader enterprise.

The Jeppesen brand consists of a whole bunch of cool legacy companies and semi-transplanted subsets of various sibling subsidiaries: SBS, Carmen, Tapestry, Enplore etc, etc. Loads of stuff in addition to the more publicly famous chart business.

Interesting. I updated my charting application’s database last night without issue.

A different press release I read mentioned issues processing NOTAMs. Generally airlines hire companies like Jeppesen to give a feed of this data. I wonder if we’ll see disruption today.

What I never understand about these ransomware attacks is why are critical systems connected to the internet at all? (Or have USB ports, etc.)

Or conversely, if a system isn't worth the hassle of air-gapping it, should it even be considered critical?

How could that be everyone is using 14 character passwords that change every 90. Totally bulletproof security…

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