The airline industry is turning to the brightest IT minds at Tel Aviv University in an effort to fight cybercrime in aviation.
A partnership between the University and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has been formed to establish a joint innovation center.
The aim is to develop more robust security systems for airline reservations and finances and make airlines run more efficiently using big data.
"The agreement with such a large and important organization as IATA demonstrates Tel Aviv University’s leading role in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as in research," said Prof. Raanan Rein, vice president of the University.
IATA and the airline industry in general are well aware of security vulnerabilities, be it fraud or hacking into flight operations.
LOT Polish Airlines’ flight operations at Warsaw airport were grounded for several hours last month after a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attack.
United Airlines has taken its own approach by offering a ‘bug bounty’ of up to one million air miles for ‘ethical hackers’ who find security weaknesses.
Last week it paid the million-mile bounty to two people who spotted system flaws.
However this didn’t stop the airline suffering a second unexplained system-wide outage last week, grounding all its flights for about one hour.
