A woman looks at flight arrival board at Sofia's Vasil Levski Airport in Bulgaria, Thursday, as three Ryanair flights bound for Sofia, Bulgaria, had to make emergency landings because of bomb threats on board.Valentina Petrova/The Associated Press
From fridges to blood banks, airports and airlines, Europe has been overrun with cyberattacks and bomb threats that have caused havoc and raised concerns about what might be hit next.
On Thursday some 25 flights to cities in more than a dozen countries including Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain and Ireland were disrupted by bomb threats. Many planes had to be diverted to secondary airports or escorted by military jets. This after roughly half a dozen flights received bomb threats earlier this week and hundreds of supermarket fridges were hacked.
No explosives have been found, and authorities are not sure who is behind the hoaxes. Italian media reported that a threat sent by e-mail to a Rome airport was signed “Fighters of the Male State.” A similar e-mail went to the Sofia airport in Bulgaria.
“You are all complicit in a criminal conspiracy. We want to destroy you for this,” the first e-mail said. “We, fighters of the Male State, with our actions today will leave a mark on history. Your feminist regime will remember this forever.”
At least 27 flights in Europe hit by second wave of hoax bomb threats
The Male State was a far-right Russian group founded in 2016 by blogger and fitness instructor Vladislav Pozdnyakov. It promoted misogyny, nationalism and white supremacist views. It was banned by a Moscow court in 2021 but resurfaced as the Male Legion, which strongly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Apostolos Tzitzikostas, the European Union’s Transportation Commissioner, said Thursday that it was “too early to draw conclusions on whether the reported incidents are linked.”
“We are closely monitoring the situation and are in contact with the affected member states and the European Aviation Safety Agency,” he added.
The bomb threats followed a series of attacks on the temperature control systems of fridges and freezers throughout Europe. The hackers ramped up the thermometer to 50 Celsius in some cases, spoiling tonnes of food.
The fridges at a blood service centre in France were also attacked, but technicians managed to intervene before any supplies were damaged.
No group has claimed responsibility, and officials believe similar attacks may have been carried out last summer on fridges at six U.S. military bases.
French blood banks hit alongside cyberattack on European supermarkets
Experts say the cybercrime is relatively simple to execute because the fridges are controlled by smart devices connected to the internet, and most lacked security features. Companies that rely on similar devices have started upgrading their security, which experts say is not difficult.
The bomb threats are also a low-tech way of causing chaos, said Rhys Jones, an analyst at Britain’s Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation intelligence firm.
“Unfortunately low sophistication increases the number of threat actors that are capable of doing it,” he said in an interview. “You don’t need nation state backing. You don’t need lots of money. We’re likely to see other measures and means intended to cause disruption, if not to aviation, to other sectors that are low sophistication from a variety of sources.”
A fire truck is parked in front of the Vaclav Havel Airport in Prague as bomb threats forced airliners to make unplanned landings across Europe.David W Cerny/Reuters
Former pilot Martin Drake, who is now a technical adviser to the British Airline Pilots’ Association, said airlines and airports have detailed procedures for handling bomb threats, which until now have been quite rare.
Each threat is carefully assessed as either “green” for low credibility, “amber” for medium and “red” for credible. If the threat is classified as red, the pilot is contacted directly by the airline’s security team, and the crew begins following an emergency check list. “It’s a well-proven, well-designed process,” he said.
What happens when an airline receives a bomb threat
If an airplane is in the air, the pilot will issue a mayday alert and head to the nearest airport with assistance from air traffic control. Once the plane is on the ground, local security officials search the aircraft, the passengers and the luggage. After an all-clear signal is given, passengers reboard, and the plane continues on its way.
Mr. Drake said the entire process is expensive and disruptive. It can take many hours to search a plane, forcing operators to reschedule flights, crews and passengers.
“The company I worked for had a 747 diverted to Montreal, and that aircraft was on the ground for nearly 12½ hours while the Mounties did their job of scouring it,” he said in an interview.
However, he doubted the bomb threats would be enough to tighten passenger screening at airports.
Mr. Jones said that, for now, airlines will have to be flexible with their itineraries and be prepared to make adjustments to accommodate increased airport security. And he expects the threats to subside once the media attention dies down.
“Certainly that’s often what we see in people who call in hoaxes and bomb threats. They just love that kind of attention,” he said.