Hackers grounded a Polish airline in a Warsaw airport on Sunday by disrupting the company’s ground operations systems.
LOT Polish Airlines were unable to allow their flights to depart from Frederic Chopin Airport for five hours from 4pm local time, leading to ten flight cancellations affecting some 1,400 passengers.
A statement posted on the firm’s Facebook page read: "As a result [of the attack] we’re not able to create flight plans and outbound flights from Warsaw are not able to depart.
"We’d like to underline, that it has no influence on plane systems. Aircrafts, that are already airborne will continue their flights. Planes with flight plans already filed will return to Warsaw normally."
The attack, which is being investigated by the country’s security agencies, follows warnings from the cybersecurity industry that cyber-terrorists could one day knock planes out of the sky by attacking their computer systems remotely.
It also comes a few months after Chris Roberts, a speaker at the RSA security conference, was banned from boarding a United Airlines plane to San Francisco after he jokingly tweeted that he could hack into the plane’s systems and deploy the oxygen masks.
These fears were echoed by Adrian Kubicki, spokesman at LOT, who told the BBC that his company used "state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry."
Like much of the transport industry, airlines are discussing increased automation of its flight systems, a goal that has only hardened in the wake of the Germanwings crash earlier this year caused by a suicidal co-pilot.
At the end of last year the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body for co-ordinating international air travel, signed an agreement with similar agencies to enhance defences against cybercrime, cyber-terrorism and cyberespionage.
