Tag: airports | SpinSafe

Airports can be safe and less chaotic when dealing with security threats

July 5, 2023/in Computer Security

You are comfortably seated at Gate A11 waiting for your flight to board, coffee in hand, when the loudspeaker announces that your terminal must be evacuated due to a security issue. At that point, thousands of people scurry to the exit, where they gather outside the terminal until the Transportation Security Administration determines what happened, why it happened, and eventually, that the security threat has been resolved before allowing people to re-enter the terminal.

The cause of such events is varied. It may be that a person entered the sterile side of the terminal unscreened, such as through a fire door. It could be a bag that was not appropriately screened, as what happened at San Diego International in August 2022. It could be a bomb threat, which occurred at San Francisco International in July 2022. It could be something as benign as an unattended bag, which led to a terminal evacuation at JFK International in July 2022. It could also be a technical error, such as what happened recently at DFW International Airport.

U.S. airports are not alone. On June 29, a passenger entered the sterile side of the airport via a fire door at Gatwick Airport, outside London. This required all passengers to be evacuated, including some who had already boarded their plane for departure, creating what was described as “chaos” in managing the rescreening process.

When any type of event occurs that compromises airport security, the ripple effect creates an endless stream of turmoil. It could impact light rail public transportation, which brings passengers to and from the airport and may need to be halted while the security breach is resolved. It impacts airport concessions, particularly food outlets, which must also evacuate, leaving food items unattended that will need to be discarded upon their return.

It obviously impacts the airlines, which must reschedule and re-accommodate the thousands of passengers on the flights that are delayed or canceled.

However, the biggest threat may be to the thousands of people who must gather outside the airport terminal, waiting for the security breach to be resolved. This often takes hours,…

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Aviation security does not end at airports

March 21, 2023/in Computer Security

The recent incident on a United flight from Los Angeles to Boston highlights why aviation security does not end at airport security checkpoints.

The passenger managed to create a weapon using a broken metal spoon and hit a flight attendant with his makeshift weapon. The passenger also attempted to open a door on the airplane, according to law enforcement officials, and believed that a flight attendant was going to kill him.

If convicted, the passenger is subject to hefty fines (as much as $250,000) and life in prison.

There is a high probability that this person suffers from mental illness. If that is the case, these penalties will serve little purpose. It may provide some deterrence benefit for someone with clear thinking but nefarious intent to see how they would be handled if they attempted such acts of violence on an airplane.

The Transportation Security Administration uses multiple layers to protect the nation’s air system. The most visible layer is at airport screening checkpoints, where passengers, carry-on bags and checked baggage are screened using a variety of technology.

A far less visible layer is air marshals, who are strategically assigned to flights based on a variety of risk factors, including the collective risk profile of passengers on a flight. Air marshals are ready to respond if any passenger acts inappropriately and threatens the security of a flight, its crew or its passengers.

Air marshals are a means to buy down risk and make a flight more secure. However, the expense of placing air marshals on flights means that air marshals are not on most flights. Moreover, the collective risk profile of most flights makes It unnecessary to have an air marshal on them. It appears that the United flight did not have an air marshal, or such a person would have responded to the incident.

The biggest takeaway from the event is how the passengers responded. Several acted quickly and decisively to wrestle the person to the ground and keep him from further harming himself or others. This made these passengers de facto air marshals.

The basis of risk-based security, the strategy employed by the TSA, is to match security resources to security risk. The most effective program that the…

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T.S.A. Confiscated Record Number of Guns at U.S. Airports in 2022

December 18, 2022/in Computer Security

The Transportation Security Administration intercepted a record number of guns at airport security checkpoints this year, the agency said on Friday, prompting it to increase the maximum fine for firearm violations. The move comes amid surges in air travel and gun sales across the country.

The agency said that it had stopped 6,301 guns — more than 88 percent of which were loaded — from passing beyond security checkpoints. By the end of the year the administration expects to have intercepted about 6,600 guns in carry-on bags, a 10 percent increase over the previous record of 5,972, set in 2021.

Officials increased the maximum fine for a firearms violation by nearly $1,000, to $14,950, “in order to reduce the threat of firearms at checkpoints,” the agency said in a news release.

“When a passenger brings a firearm to the checkpoint, this consumes significant security resources and poses a potential threat to transportation security, in addition to being very costly for the passenger,” the T.S.A. administrator, David Pekoske, said in a statement.

The announcement came about three months after the agency said that it was on pace to break the record once again, as air travel in the United States neared prepandemic levels.

Besides a drop in 2020, when travelers stayed home amid pandemic lockdowns, the number of firearm interceptions by the T.S.A. has steadily increased each year since 2010.

Passengers are allowed to bring guns in checked baggage, so long as the weapons are unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container. Passengers must also declare guns at the check-in counter. But guns are not allowed in carry-on bags at any T.S.A. checkpoint, even if a passenger has a concealed weapon permit.

That distinction may be behind the thousands of mishaps in recent years, some experts say. Travelers may be unfamiliar with the rules for bringing firearms on planes, especially if they have not traveled since the start of the pandemic, said Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an expert on aviation security.

“The majority of people are not doing it with malicious intent,” Dr. Jacobson said. “They’re simply…

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Are You Being Spied On? This Google Hack Can Access Security Cameras At Airports, Schools And Other Places – Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)

November 27, 2022/in Internet Security

In this article, we will explain how anyone — and not just information technology experts — can find and access security cameras, passwords, system logs and other databases that were meant to be secret.

Before proceeding further, it is important to consider that performing the actions described in this article may or may not be illegal based on your local legislation. This information is being divulged to convey the importance of network security and educate the readers.

What Happened: Scanning networks, which include the internet itself, is one of the most common ways to find vulnerabilities and access data and services that were not meant to be accessible.

Traditionally it would be done from a command line with a tool like Nmap, but another well-known way to find this kind of weakness is by leveraging Google, a company that kindly scans the whole internet and indexes its findings doing most of the work for us.

This kind of usage of Alphabet Inc.‘s GOOG GOOGL search engine is usually called “Google Dorking” — dorks, a word describing “a contemptible, socially inept person” and in this case, referring to whoever managed to misconfigure the services you find with this technique. This approach leverages very specific search queries that use Google modifiers to find data that should have been private, but due to misconfiguration is public.

How To Do It: One example is searching for “allintext:username filetype:.env,” which limits our results to only text files with the .env extension and searches for the word “username” in their content. This kind of search tends to find configuration files that contain usernames and passwords of external services such as emails or databases, often very secure and long alphanumerical passwords that would have been quite safe if they were not broadcasted in plain text for the whole world to see.

A much more unsettling example is the search query “intitle:”webcamXP 5″” which tells Google to only return results that contain exactly “webcamXP 5” in their title — this being the default title of the video feed page of a certain family of security…

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