Ever since the restoration of the normal functioning of airlines, Spicejet has found itself in the middle of public scrutiny.
From suddenly canceled flights to unwarranted customer-related issues, the airline has experienced a lot of media coverage in recent times. However, the delay on May 25, 2022 flights in the morning was due to a completely different reason.
Spicejet had to come forward and announce to their customers that their morning flights for May 25 will be delayed for some time due to an unexpected cyberattack. To better answer their customers, Spicejet published an official statement:
“Certain Spicejet Systems faced an attempted ransomware attack last night that impacted and slowed down morning flight departures today. Our IT team has contained and rectified the situation and flights are operating normally now.”
Even with the official statement, Spicejet customers are still wary of their flights and want to get a more comprehensive answer to the complications that have come up.
Spicejet has assured their customers that the problem was proactively handled by their IT team, which means that the customers won’t have to worry about issues like data leaks or privacy breaches, which was one of the most common issues that sparked the interest of the customers.
Spicejet hasn’t provided further details about the ransomware attacks or gone into what’s and why it has happened. However, the customers have been informed that the malware attack ended up locking the system remotely.
To unlock the systems, the hackers asked for a ransom in exchange for it, which was the reason why most of the morning flights were delayed.
The primary threat of the ransomware attack was the complete deletion of the important files and data that help Spicejet operate optimally. In case the data is deleted, some of the computers become completely unusable by the IT staff unless the ransom isn’t paid. Also, most of these ransomware attacks are dealt with by cryptocurrencies to maintain anonymity.
Spicejet isn’t the first organization that was hit with a ransomware attack. Instead, reports from Sophos suggest that around 78% of Indian companies experienced similar issues until 2021, the numbers increasing at a very rapid.
While some of these attacks were recoverable, most Indian organizations have had to pay up to $1 million per attack, all to ensure that the important data isn’t decrypted or deleted by the attackers. How much or whether Spicejet had to pay a ransom to fix the issue is still unknown.