Allied Pilots Association says a suspected ransomware attack knocked several systems offline

Allied Pilots Association, the labour union representing American Airlines pilots, announced last week that it suffered a data security incident that affected several systems and forced it to take them offline to mitigate its impact.

Allied Pilots Association (APA) is a labour union that represents more than 15,000 American Airlines pilots and is considered as one of the largest independent pilots’ trade unions globally.

In a notice on its website, the association said that on October 30, it identified a cyber security incident that affected its internal network and immediately launched an investigation with assistance from third party cyber security experts to understand the nature and scope of the incident.

“Our IT team, with the support of outside experts, continues to work nonstop to restore our systems. We are pleased to report that our restoration efforts are progressing, and we will soon be able to begin to bring back some of our online services.

“Initially, this will include the majority of our Web 2.0 product. Once the initial restoration is in place, we will continue to restore additional services over the coming hours and days, placing a priority on pilot-facing products and tools,” the notice reads.

While its investigation is still ongoing, APA believes that the security incident was a result of a ransomware attack that encrypted certain systems in its internal network. Once the restoration process is complete, “the APA website will contain a Service Restoration dashboard to provide additional information on our restoration efforts,” APA said.

APA says it is in the process of determining whether any member data was compromised during the incident and will share updates as and when available.

Earlier this year, the sensitive personal information of at least 5,745 American Airlines pilots were compromised as a result of third parties accessing a vendor’s internal network.

The airline company also fell victim to a successful phishing attack in July 2022 that involved a threat actor gaining unauthorised access to a limited number of employees’ email accounts. The company launched an investigation to understand the scope of the phishing attack and determined that 1,708 American Airlines customers and employees were impacted by the incident.