A Delta A350 departs DTW – Photo: Andrew Poure

“Delta Air Lines was recently bombarded with 20,000 phishing emails over just a few hours. Two bad actors had directly targeted airline employees with malicious content in a brazen attempt to circumvent the airline’s security infrastructure.” Shocking, right?

Don McCoy, Cyber Security Manager for Delta openly shared this with a room of over 200 security professionals. To those not in the industry (that’s me) this sounds sensational. Interestingly, fellow attendees of Exabeam‘s #Spotlight19 conference largely didn’t react. It turns out, such attacks are commonplace for high-visibility organizations.

In retrospect, airlines make for an incredibly attractive target. All of the U.S. “big four” airlines now earn revenue well into the double-digit billions each year. They have data on millions of customers. And of course, airline employees have access to restricted virtual and physical assets. For these reasons, it is no wonder airlines are subject to the nonstop barrage of attempts to gain access to and exploit their data.

Preventing, identifying, and responding to phishing attacks is just the tip of the iceberg. Click through to read about how airlines use big data and analytics to identify fraud and even predict maintenance events.