Hoax bomb threats disrupted at least 25 different commercial flights across Europe yesterday, with some forced to make emergency landings, and after similar threats on Tuesday, when seven planes were searched or diverted after malicious alerts.
There is, at least so for, no suggestion of orchestration by a hostile terror group or state actor according to investigators, although investigations continue. It’s perfectly possible that this could be the work of some lone disruptors, says Dan, who reminds me that “airlines receive bomb threats on a daily basis, at a rate that we would find extraordinary if we knew”. Nonetheless, the fact that these airlines are treating these threats as credible suggests a potential level of coordination, aviation experts told the Guardian on Thursday.
These threats take place with aviation security under sharper scrutiny after the flydubai incident, when a pilot fought off his knife-wielding colleague in an apparent attempt to crash a full passenger flight heading for Tel Aviv.
But beyond that “jittery background noise”, is a significant step-change in the manner of threat we face. Twenty-five years on from the inception of the War on Terror, when Islamist terrorism has receded relative to the hostile state threats, “we’re living in a different world with familiar uncertainties, but attributed to different players,” Dan tells me.
Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are reverberating closer to home. Since 2022, we’ve witnessed intensifying acts of sabotage on European states that are believed to trace back to Russia but deliberately fall below the threshold for military response – a so-called hybrid or “shadow war” with the singular purpose of disrupting support for Ukraine. Only two months ago, an alleged attack plot on RAF Fairford was organised by a handler police believe was working on behalf of Iran.
Meanwhile, tech expert Azeem Azhar warned recently that the internet is experiencing it’s own Wuhan moment, as AI enables bad actors to hunt for system flaws and spread them, mirroring the early days of the Covid pandemic.
“Terrorism doesn’t have to be violent to terrorise,” says Dan. “The purpose of terrorism is to scare.”
What about other targets?
Ratcheting up disruption, and the accompanying psychological hit, is precisely what we’ve seen elsewhere this week. Supermarket fridges and freezers in seven European countries malfunctioned earlier this week, their thermostats remotely cranked up in some cases to 50C, in what some fear indicates a new front in hacking tactics.
Similar incidents have been reported in the UK, and I spoke to our global technology editor Dan Milmo on his way back from interviewing a fruit and veg wholesaler based near Heathrow, whose fridges went on the blink on Monday. The experience has prompted him to add some tinned goods to his weekend shopping list.
“There are only ever two likely candidates for a hack,” Dan tells me. “Criminal gangs or nation states.” He adds an emerging tertiary category of “troublesome teenagers”, such as the loose collective of English-speaking hackers Scattered Spider, two of whom were jailed in July for their attack on Transport for London.
One cybersecurity researcher told Dan that attacks on dummy Danfoss fridge controls – one of the software systems also targeted by the hackers in mainland Europe – had “all the hallmarks” of operations linked to Russia.
What are security services doing about these threats?
“There is a very real and intense cyberwar going on out there,” Dan Sabbagh tells me, and security agencies in the UK have viewed technological resilience as a key part of their responsibility for a number of years. The Turing Institute, for example, is looking at ways to utilise AI to make critical infrastructure systems more secure.
The police and security services are monitoring for threats all the time – MI5 has about 3,000 active subjects of interest currently – arranged in a hierarchy, with an understandable focus on the more serious ones, including threats to life. But lower level activity that is not obviously threatening, whether that’s online activity or buying paint with the intention of daubing racist graffiti, can be harder to pick up. As with other public services, this is a resourcing question as much as anything else.
Is chaos easier to generate in our interconnected world?
I put this to our global technology reporter Aisha Down, who explains that many hacks happen though edge devices – networked items that are connected to the internet but don’t have processing power and so aren’t the main focus of security upgrades by a company or household.
Famously, in 2016, North Korea came within a few keystrokes of pulling off a billion-dollar heist by hacking the Bank of Bangladesh via an unsecured printer.
Aisha is keen to dial down the panic. The point about cyber-attacks is that every single one is opportunistic: a hacker has to find a vulnerability and then discover a way to exploit it. “Just like a burglary, you might get into the room where all the jewellery is stored,” she says, “but the damage you can do is not a given.”
There is, however, a steady escalation in this type of threat. Aisha gives the example of Finland which, given its proximity to Russia, is watching cyber-tactics very closely. “What people report to their national cybersecurity centre is growing, from 18,000 reports last year for a population of 6 million people, to 21,000 this year.” This can be partly traced back to a developing criminal hacking ecosystem, some with loose links to the Russian state.
Do we need to buy more beans?
While a key element of a cyber-attack is the psychological impact, that can be hard to square with the UK government’s own Be Ready initiative, which advises us to off-set threats of hybrid warfare and hostile state sabotage by stockpiling 72 hours’ worth of emergency supplies – including water, beans and Twiglets (if you’re Andy Burnham). Indeed, governments across Europe are advising citizens to build up non-perishable larders.
It’s perhaps useful to balance the likelihood of a cyber-attack with the potential scope, suggests Aisha, who confesses she’s too busy sourcing furniture for her new flat to think about tinned goods.
One European cybersecurity official told Aisha recently that there’s a vulnerability in every 1,500 lines of code, on average.
“Their view is: it’s going to happen. It’s going to be opportunistic. But, unlike bombing a power station in the dead of winter, you won’t be offline for months.”
With that perspective, keeping a bunch of tenners handy to see you through a few days of disruption makes sense.
As for stockpiling food and water, Dan is still debating with his partner just how necessary those extra tins of peas really are. “If you’re a government wanting to spend £10bn more on defence by the end of the decade, it’s useful to have that message about keeping a few bottles of water at home,” he says.
To be clear: it’s not Dan’s intention to dismiss stockpiling advice as a purely cynical exercise. The developing threats are all too real. But as he puts it: “If the purpose of terrorism is to generate fear, the first thing you should do is not panic and keep calm.”
Attacking refrigeration systems that store blood products is a sinister but not immediate threat. Photograph: Lionel RAULT/EFS/AP
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