Bomb alert diverts Aer Lingus plane from Dublin - why is this happening?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman, on Newstalk, with Kiya.

Shane Colman (0:08)

Let's talk about that story. It's been running on the news headlines all day, an Aer Lingus plane flying from Dublin to Rome, among a number of flights across Europe affected by bomb threats, bomb hoaxes. Cork Airport also received an anonymous phone threat, leading to a 90 minute delay to a flight. At least eight flights across the continent were confirmed to have been targeted, including services from Copenhagen, Helsinki, Madrid, Milan and Warsaw. We're joined now to discuss this by Patrick Bury, defence and security expert at the University of Bath, a former NATO analyst, and Kevin Curran, professor of cyber security at Ulster University.

Patrick, I might come to you first. This is obviously a very coordinated thing. This isn't random hoax calls from somebody who is maybe a little unstable or something. Do we know who or what is behind this?

Patrick Bury (1:03)

We don't have a full picture yet, Shane, but the scale and scope and the way it's escalated would suggest the target is obviously systematic disruption. It looks like at least one rustling group has claimed responsibility for some of the threats, but we'll have to see what comes to light as we go on. There are basically a far right sort of male chauvinist anti-feminist group, and they said that they were putting as an anti-feminist stance, they'd made the bomb hoaxes. But it's important to point out one of all these, these are hoaxes at the moment.

There is a lot of them. I mean, there's reports there may be at least 20 today and counting. So we'll have to see if it does settle. But it's coming at a time when there has been obviously the cyber attacks on the supermarkets, which has been felt at home. It looks like the concentration of the targets and of the hoaxes in terms of the air. Craft involved a lot either going to Southern airports or Eastern European airports. So Warsaw overrepresented, Sofia overrepresented. But there's been a big enough spread. One of the things that stands out to me looking at it so far again is there has been no targeting of either US major carriers.

The British national carriers or the French national carrier, and they are all the nuclear powers. Read into that what you will. Let's see what happens.

Shane Colman (2:32)

I'm curious, what do you read into it?

Patrick Bury (2:35)

It's just one of the things I'm picking out is sort of if you look at the patterns and you go, it's difficult to say, but this is obviously Ryanair has been hit at least eight times with a hoax. So, yeah, you know.

Shane Colman (2:47)

Okay. Is it reasonable, just before I bring Kevin in, is it reasonable to assume then that this is a state sponsored actor involved?

Patrick Bury (2:57)

I would say it's the most likely explanation on the information we have at the moment would point towards Russian involvement.

The distributed way that some of these groups work within, if it's either social media or hacking groups, etc.

work towards the aim of the Russian state and often with explicit or indeed tacit Russian approval. So there's a history of that through numerous different kinds of hacks, cyber attacks, etc. What you find is that given the Russian state's ability to suppress people, that they don't want to express dissent or anything like that, it's pretty difficult for you to carry out something which has got fairly deep strategic consequences potentially without the approval of a boss, as it were. The other point is, there's also a context here to do with cargo planes in which the Russians have shown that they've had the ability to get and send your explosive devices onto cargo planes with some near misses. This is all to do with the movement of logistics into Ukraine, DHL-type planes targeted. But you've also had the Leipzig incident where an explosive drone landed next to an aircraft. There's also that area, but that has not been focused at all on civilian airliners so far.

Shane Colman (4:13)

Okay. Can I bring in Kevin Curran, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University. Kevin, what's your take on it?

Kevin Curran (4:20)

You're right. I don't want to attribute it because a lot of the groups that actually claim for these things just want to publicity as such. But in some ways, it's lo-fi.

There's no barriers to entry to send an email or even Jubilee's calls really. In other words, it's very low tech. It could be an individual or people, obviously with countries who have problems with the West as well. Iran has also been mentioned as well, but you never go too far around. Nowadays, we're pointing it towards Russia because they've shown that in all the other attacks as well, that we see over the years as well really, that they're given a carte blanche as well, that the authorities don't come down on a lot of the hacking groups here. Now, it looks like a lot of them are possibly working with state as a state sponsored hacking group actually.