Volunteers rehearse response to cyberattack at Tallinn Airport

Volunteer IT specialists are rehearsing how to keep Tallinn Airport operating during a large-scale cyberattack, ERR reported.

Members of the State Information System Authority’s cyber reserve are working through a scenario in which airport check-in systems fail and the baggage system stops working. The disruption could leave passengers without their luggage, delay or cancel flights and force staff to check travellers manually, the authority’s lead expert, Armani Pogosjan, said.

Pogosjan said the exercise reflects real incidents, citing a similar attack in Latvia a few months ago and a larger attack at Dublin Airport several years ago.

Essential service providers in Estonia face attempted cyberattacks every day, although most are thwarted and incidents with an impact are rare. In early November, hackers accessed refrigerators at retailer Selver. Tallinn Airport’s chief executive, Riivo Tuvike, said attacks on infrastructure increased after Russia invaded Ukraine and may have grown further as artificial intelligence made them easier and cheaper to carry out.

This was the cyber reserve’s fifth exercise with an Estonian critical infrastructure organisation. The volunteer IT specialist network has no equivalent elsewhere in the world, the report said. While responding to a real attack could take a week, teams had one day each for the exercise, which organisers considered successful.