Metro State University Director of Cyber Programs Faisal Kaleem said this service disruption should be a wake-up call.
MINNEAPOLIS — The FAA outage sparked concern across the country, but there isn’t any information to indicate it was a cyberattack.
Metro State University Director of Cyber Programs Faisal Kaleem said it appears there was some sort of power or mechanical failure at the 511 Building, also known as the Minnesota Technology Center in downtown Minneapolis.
“This 511 building is what they call a carrier hotel because it kind of brings the different kinds of connectivity into the same building,” Kaleem said.
He said even though it wasn’t a cyberattack and did show our systems are vulnerable.
“It proved that an adversary does not need to spend months and months of hacking into dozens of individual airlines, cellphone systems, or cell companies, city halls, if they can just, either physically or logically disable one central physical location,” he said.
Kaleem said this was just a single point of failure; however, it shows how dependent we are on interconnectivity and how that can have a cascading domino effect impacting multiple states.
“Imagine if this was cyberattack, then what actually happened yesterday, just multiply that by 100 or 10 times,” Kaleem said.
He said operators at the facility were able to restore the network. He said it shows that we need more resilient systems.
“There has to be a mechanism… which is basically that all the traffic should be automatically rerouted to some other entities in the region,” he said.
Flights resumed at MSP Thursday night. The FAA is still investigating what happened.
