alt Hacker NewsCan you fill in the blanks here? My attempt: "China would never spy on us, but because of the implication they would put 50k of our citizens currently in the air in mortal danger"?
Can you fill in the blanks here? My attempt: "China would never spy on us, but because of the implication they would put 50k of our citizens currently in the air in mortal danger"?
It's not a credible thesis, at least not given the info we have. Tier 1 cyber enemies would have done something more subtle (so as not to trigger a kinetic warfare response or a response in kind) or something so obvious that they announce it with a declaration of war.
It's far more likely that the creaky old civilian radar infra has problems or some old single point of failure (maybe an old mainframe) has/had downtime. There are 3 widely rumored causes of this FAA outage (with seemingly no evidence) related to projects that the Feds were already working on making: (1) an AI air traffic controller assistant, (2) migration to something newer than 1970s floppy disk tech, (3) migration away from radar to GPS for controllers).
All of these are more likely than a foreign cyber team attacking FAA systems in this way.