Cyber threats and systemic vulnerabilities emerge as major concerns at IATA Congress

At the IATA Congress 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, panellists turned their attention to the escalating dangers posed by cyber risks to the aviation industry and global infrastructure. Richard Quest shared that he wanted to talk about the danger that we do not really everybody knows is the huge one who really not quite sure what to do about it which is cyber and that if you talk to most CEOs they will all tell you how serious it is and existential to their companies and they are putting huge amounts of effort into it but the reality is we are facing risks there so unique that the number of cases arising is growing and the damage being caused is increasing.

Nick Allan shared that this is goodness me that we are pretty gloomy are not we but you are right and we have for the last few years had a low level largely low level cyber war going on in Europe with a lot of Russian backed activity and questioned how many times can immigration systems fail in places like England and France that are attributed just to system errors, adding that AI is facilitating threat actors to be more effective and it is also facilitating defences though so this is now a standard risk it is moving fast and the challenge for industry is to understand the threats where they are coming from and why they might be targeted but this is part of the risk landscape now and it is going to get worse.

Richard Quest shared that he was talking to a bank CEO who would not give the number but the number of attacks that their systems pick up every single minute and it is the same with the airlines and they will not give us the numbers but they are absolutely huge the number of attacks and these are not some of these are malicious criminals they are not state sponsored actors which are bringing to bear much more ferocious resources against us. Nick Allan shared that the watch word of the last five years or so or ten years certainly the business he is in has been around building resilience and that is the lesson out of this is you need to be ready for it to happen so airlines are quite good at having manual systems that they can fall back on.

The discussion highlighted real world impacts with Richard Quest referencing the M and S attack in England which virtually closed down part of the company because of a cyber attack that went on months. Nick Allan shared that Jaguar Land Rover was hit for two billion dollars and that came through their supply chain but the defences are evolving fast but you need to have resilience and one of the risks in the aviation sector is around antiquated systems with a lot of talk in the US around antiquated systems and air traffic control and a lot of challenges in Europe. Marie Owens Thomsen shared that it is this low system awareness that we have we are all so segmented and we look at our little bits of responsibility and we do not think about all the others whereas it is literally all a system everything hangs together you get impacted here and no bigger example than our industry to see how that just propagates across the whole world.

Matt Kaminski shared that he is much more frightened by how backward governments are on technology and are only now realising that to try and catch up and that includes air traffic control in the US.