Air Canada confronts threat of cyberattacks

Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu said the Montreal-based airline is developing a comprehensive strategy to counter potential cyberattacks, and encouraged other airlines to take a similar approach. “Being protected against cyberattacks is not something I would consider a competitive advantage,” he said. “It’s something that’s valuable to share with other airlines, in my view.” Rovinescu emphasised that securing an airline’s data and systems is “not the responsibility of only the CIO” and needs to be tackled from an airline-wide perspective. “I’d say we’re still in the early innings of getting out in front of this,” he said. “We start out with some scary numbers: Experts estimate that the amount of damage caused by cyberattacks last year was $500b and 94% of companies had some sort of attack.” Rovinescu said Air Canada identified 72 “critical business processes” and made security risk assessments on each one, identifying the company’s greatest vulnerabilities and developing plans to protect the data exchanged in those processes from hackers. “You have to start somewhere,” he said. “Instead of 72 maybe it should have been 172. We don’t have all the answers … Five years from now, there may be a different answer.”<br/>