00:00A jarring incident occurred at four North American airports, three of them in Canada.
00:05Late yesterday, communication systems within the airports, briefly taken over by apparent hackers.
00:11Travelers captured the moment when unauthorized messages praising Hamas blasted on the speakers.
00:17Sarah is following this for us now. What do we know about this?
00:21Yeah, so four airports, three of them as you say in Canada,
00:25but I want to put up a map here to show you because it doesn't seem to be,
00:28I mean, it's difficult to say why any one of these airports were necessarily targeted in this.
00:34We have one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then in Windsor, Ontario,
00:38and then two in British Columbia, Victoria, British Columbia, and in Kelowna, B.C., the airport there.
00:44It's in Kelowna, B.C., where the news organization that's local to the interior of B.C., Castanet,
00:51they have shared an image with us taken by somebody in the airport at the time.
00:56It was, this is what was posted, this, to the various communication boards,
01:02the boards that would normally display flight information.
01:05The airport saying that this was up there for really only about 20 seconds,
01:09the airport says, before they were able to take it down.
01:12But on it, there is some profanity, which we have blocked out here.
01:16And then the message essentially is claiming Hamas victory
01:19and then calling the U.S. President Donald Trump a pig.
01:23And we also do have a video out of the Pennsylvania, Harrisburg airport of the PA system,
01:31the public announcement system that was also hacked here.
01:34And a message was played over that PA system.
01:39Again, there's profanity and we have beeped that out.
01:42But I do want to play you a little bit of that clip because it gives you a sense of what passengers
01:45who are inside that airport at the time were listening to for what we understand was,
01:50you know, somewhere around three minutes.
01:53Free, free Palestine.
01:55Free, free Palestine.
01:57Free, free Palestine.
01:59It's important to note, we don't specifically know each airport, what was put up on a display,
02:20whether something was put up on a display.
02:22For instance, we understand at the Victoria, British Columbia airport,
02:25there was nothing on the display but the PA system.
02:27Again, there was some kind of an audio message.
02:30We only have the one audio message from that one airport in the United States.
02:35What is, you know, common to all of these four airports is that they have all addressed this
02:39in the form of a statement.
02:40And in those statements, all striking a similar tone and explaining that this was basically
02:46a third party gaining access to the terminal's cloud-based external public address.
02:51And in the case of Victoria, they explained that this is an outside software provider.
02:56And in all cases, that audio does seem to be taken over with some kind, as I say, some
03:02kind of a message.
03:03In the case of Kelowna, I noted this.
03:05It was about 20 seconds, they say, on the screens.
03:07There was also some kind of an audio message.
03:10A group calling itself Cyber Islam appears to be taking credit for this.
03:14And I can say that in the case of Kelowna, there were some flight delays.
03:17But things did resume normally in the evening.
03:20It was determined not to be any kind of a security threat.
03:22And it has been all systems go through it today.
03:24Yeah.
03:25So a couple of things here.
03:25First of all, it's interesting.
03:27In Kelowna, they say that message was only up for 20 seconds.
03:30And if somebody had time to pull out their phone and take a picture of it within those
03:3420 seconds, that's incredible.
03:36Also, no suggestion that this affected safety of flights in any way, right?
03:41Right.
03:41No.
03:42Because, yes, no suggestion that there was.
03:44There were checks that were done, as we understand it.
03:46In the case of Windsor, I don't think there was actually almost anybody in the airport
03:50at the time this was happening.
03:51These are not particularly large airports.
03:53But the common thing is that they all do use this kind of communications system that's
03:58a third party, right?
03:59Yeah.
04:00And I should say, you know, we take care when we do a story like this because we're not
04:02trying to provide a platform for the people who took this over.
04:06But at the same time, we feel it's worth reporting.
04:08And one of the reasons why it's worth reporting is it shows you the vulnerability of these systems.
04:14And imagine if somebody tried to induce panic in an airport by taking over those boards.
04:19Transport Canada, what did they say?
04:21Yeah.
04:21So Transport Canada, as well as these airports, has also put out its own statement.
04:26Let me read you what Transport Canada says.
04:28It says that the agency is working closely with federal security partners, including law
04:33enforcement, to ensure there are no impacts on the safety and security of airport operations
04:38and to mitigate disruption from similar incidents in the future.
04:42And I think, Ian, you can be sure that all the airports that were affected by this are
04:47doing the same to make sure this is something that's not going to happen again.
04:50It's taken them by surprise, obviously, that it happened in the first place.
04:53Yeah.
04:53A lot of concern in Canada about the systems being, you know, computer systems being vulnerable
05:00to cyber attacks.
05:01Fortunately, as I say, this doesn't affect safety at all.
05:03But you just wonder about vulnerability of other areas, other software areas at airports.
05:08Sarah, thank you very much.
05:09Yeah.
05:12Yeah.
05:16Yeah.
05:17Yeah.
05:17Yeah.
05:18Yeah.
05:18Yeah.
05:18Yeah.
05:19Mm-hmm.
05:35Yeah.
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