http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/03/01/gross.jpg

I heard Virgin are including in flight weather updates - and if you don't like the weather there you can just take control and fly somewhere else! Brilliant!


Good grief... Makes you wonder what kind of network expertise they called on when designing such a system. I would assume it was the one guy in the office who had made a lan for his house.
Any network professional who thought mixing public data with critical systems needs to have his head examined!
My company has recently been jumping backwards through hoops to comply with the PCI regs regarding handling of credit card data, and that kind of network c*ck up would have you laughed out of the audit in the first couple of minutes.
I guess a Boeing is less important than a Barclaycard.

Just because it's not publicized doesn't mean it's secure.

Gunter said Boring

Gives new meaning to a BSOD! I would imagine that the FAA would have a separate backdoor in the system that could take over the functions of the plane in the case of a hijacking event. Passengers should have no ability to remote connect to anything but the entertainment networks. Why not have physically separate networks with different routing points?

But the whole point was so the feds could take control of the plane 
from the ground if it were hi jacked. If you look on the internet 
there are articles about the feds wanted to be able to take control of 
an aircraft from the ground if its reported its been hi jacked by 
terrorists, so its the FAA who is putting national security at risk by 
making this information public. Why would you tell the public the 
technical specification of an aircraft, is that not tipping off the 
bad guys? The good guys the feds have been trying to get aircraft like 
this for a long time, but it was supposed to be secret that the feds 
are able to take over an aircraft from the ground to stop terrorists 
from doing another 9/11. Sure we need to address this issue so un 
authorised folks can't take control of the aircraft, but I don't think 
any of this should of been made public for security reasons, this 
could of all of been sorted out behind closed doors. 

In our opinion a system like this is never 100% safe unless the two networks are completely physically separated.

whereby they almost certainly link down to the same base station?