Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday that the root cause of Friday’s nationwide ground stop is still undetermined but that federal investigators have “no indication” that a hack was behind the communications glitch.
Duffy said on ABC’s This Week that President Donald Trump brought together a “whole-of-government approach,” adding agencies and officials like the director of national intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI were on the strategy call to figure out what was occurring.
“Everybody was on a call together, and our intelligence partners were saying, ‘Listen, we’re not seeing any of the chatter or the footprints that we would normally see if this was a cyber attack.’ And so we felt pretty comfortable that this was an internal network issue that’s owned and operated for us by L3Harris, not an outside factor. We feel pretty good still today that this is not a hacking event,” Duffy said.
He added that if the FBI does find an indication of a cyberattack, the federal government would share that with the public, but that there is still “no indication that this was a hack.”
Duffy has said the flight stoppage was due to a disruption from an L3Harris contractor upgrading a telecommunications line from a copper wire to a fiber optic cable. As the contractor installed the new router, the new technology apparently overloaded the air traffic control system, leading to the ground stop.
When the outlet asked if the Department of Transportation has ruled out sabotage, Duffy said the agency is investigating the “full suite of issues” related to the telecommunications installation.
“Now, we know who did the install: a good American patriot, we believe, a veteran,” Duffy said. “So, we don’t think that someone tried to sabotage the network on the install at all. But we don’t actually have the root cause, which is why we do the investigation with our L3Harris partner on the network and the FBI and the FAA.”
DUFFY CRITICIZES FAA TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROVIDER L3HARRIS FOR MISHAP THAT LED TO GROUND STOP
Duffy added that he believes conditions in the airspace would begin returning to normal on Sunday but would not return fully to normal until Monday. He added that L3Harris and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the router to see why one remote could have that drastic an effect.
“We didn’t think that should or would happen, and so we have that router in the L3Harris lab down in Florida. Our FAA team is on site as well. We’ve been partnering with the FBI and other law enforcement. We want to take a look at what happened there,” Duffy said.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
