News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Some of the following articles had been published in NOTW originally, but now it seems sort of clear that we are dealing with a massive CYBERATTACK hitting 3 NATO countries the very same day.

Failure of Crucial FAA System Software Grounds Thousands of Planes Across US

This prompted a nationwide ground stop to all flights in the morning hours of Jan. 11, which lasted about an hour-and-a-half before the FAA announced it was resuming flights at 8:50 a.m. (ET).
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The FAA released a statement about eight hours after the ground stop ended saying they are investigating the problems that led to the malfunction of their safety program.

“We are continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the FAA said.

“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. We are working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”

However, the Department of Transportation has not ruled out “nefarious activity” as the reason behind the computer outage, as The Epoch Times previously reported.

The FAA reports it lasted for about an hour and a half, but people suffered the consequences of its recklessness for many more hours after they had sent the command to resume flights. 

Canada's air hazard notification system experiences brief disruption

The computer system that alerts airlines and pilots flying in Canadian airspace to potential hazards experienced a brief disruption on Wednesday.

The system, called the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, is operated by Nav Canada, a private non-profit that owns and operates Canada's air traffic control system.

Nav Canada said it began experiencing problems with the NOTAM entry system on Wednesday morning that left it unable to send new updates to airlines.

No flights were delayed as a result, said Nav Canada, and the system came back online in the early afternoon.
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Later Wednesday evening, Nav Canada said it believed the issue was caused by a computer hardware failure. The agency ruled out the possibility that it was caused by a cyber attack.

A number of Canadian flights to and from the U.S. were disrupted Tuesday and Wednesday due to a breakdown in the U.S. NOTAM system.

And here comes the actual novelty!

Cyberattack halts Royal Mail's overseas post

If you’re looking to send letters or parcels outside of the UK using Royal Mail, you’ll want to hold off for a little while. Royal Mail is suffering from “severe disruption” after an unnamed cyber incident.

We are temporarily unable to despatch items to overseas destinations. We strongly recommend that you temporarily hold any export mail items while we work to resolve the issue. Items that have already been despatched may be subject to delays. We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for any disruption this incident is causing.

Our import operations continue to perform a full service, with some minor delays. Parcelforce Worldwide export services are still operating to all international destinations though customers should expect delays of one to two days.

The date on the announcement is January 11, 2023. Those British never add the -th suffix. 

The attack is being investigated by third parties, but there’s no word currently with regard to how quickly the services will be back online. Royal Mail has told Bleeping Computer that domestic deliveries are unaffected, so for now people will just have to steer clear of anything overseas bound. 

This is an excerpt of Bleeping Computer's article:

A UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) spokesperson said that the NCSC is "aware of an incident affecting Royal Mail Group Ltd and are working with the company, alongside the National Crime Agency, to fully understand the impact."

"Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update you as soon as we have more information," Royal Mail also said on Wednesday.

Draw your own (ongoing) conclusions.