Flying through Seattle’s hacked airport

Several days after the Port of Seattle announced a “possible” cyberattack on its systems, Seattle-Tacoma Airport is still largely offline, causing chaos among travelers and acting as a standing warning against taking cybersecurity lightly. Ask me how I know.

The outage resulting from the recent hack has not, fortunately, caused planes to fall out of the sky or Air Traffic Control to double-book a runway. Those resources, run by the feds, are considerably more locked down.

Rather than catastrophe, what we have now — and for the foreseeable future, since authorities have offered no timeline for restoration — is an object lesson in why we have rules about where we put our eggs.

For my part, I found out on Sunday when — and I hesitate even to mention it, because no one seems to know about this miraculous service — I went to reserve my place in the security line via the SEA Spot Saver. The service was offline, and throwing the kind of error that you don’t have to be a sysadmin to know means deeper problems.

If I had been a good reporter and read my own publication over the weekend, I would have known this was the result of, among other things, the entire user-facing DNS configuration of the Port’s web architecture being totally cooked. (The Spot Saver site is still offline, but the function has been resuscitated by Clear for now.)

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