A passenger on a Delta service from Las Vegas to Atlanta on Monday is alleged to have stood up a bogus Wi-Fi network aboard the aircraft, prompting the pilots to raise it with air traffic control while still airborne. The airline has confirmed the incident and radio traffic from the flight is publicly available.
Delta's position is that nothing about the flight was ever unsafe. A spokesperson for the airline, Morgan Durrant, said that safety was not in question at any point, that no operating systems aboard the aircraft were touched, and that the plane's own network was not breached. The airline says it is still assembling the facts, expects that to take a while, and will work with federal law enforcement and aviation regulators on the investigation.
The immediate response in the cabin was to shut the real network down. Crew switched off the aircraft's own Wi-Fi for roughly half an hour once they understood what was going on.
The pilots sent two messages to controllers during the flight. In them they described a passenger having stood up what they called a scam network, built to pass itself off as the aircraft's genuine one. They had nothing further to add, beyond one detail worth noting: a number of people aboard were returning from security conferences that had been running in Las Vegas the week before.
What the person or people involved were actually attempting is not clear. Standing up an impostor network is not difficult. Off-the-shelf hardware exists for exactly this — devices marketed at professionals who test corporate defences for a living, and at hobbyists learning how the attacks work.
Officially, not much is on record yet. Police in Atlanta directed questions to federal agencies. A Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson, Steve Kulm, said no report of the incident had reached the agency. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
