Cyber Incident Victim: Aeroporto di Bologna
Date:
Mar 2023
Location:
Italy
Summary
The Bologna Airport experienced a disruptive cyber attack targeting its public website, causing slowdowns and partial outages that affected user access to online information services. No operational impact occurred to internal airport systems, flight schedules, or traveler services within the terminal, ensuring continued normal flight operations. Technical teams actively worked to restore full website functionality following the incident.
| CIA Posture | Motives | Tactics, Techniques & Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| Available to members | 1 motive | 1 technique |
| Threat Actors | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 0 actors | Available to members | Available to members |
Description
On the morning of March 22, 2023, the official website of Bologna's Guglielmo Marconi Airport experienced a disruptive cyberattack that significantly degraded its accessibility. The attack specifically targeted the airport’s public-facing web infrastructure, causing widespread navigation slowdowns and partial page-load failures for users attempting to access flight information and other online services through the official portal. While the exact technical mechanism of the attack remains unspecified in available reports, it manifested as a sustained disruption to the website’s normal operations, with intermittent service degradation affecting public access throughout the day. Airport authorities detected the incident shortly after its onset, prompting immediate engagement by their internal technical teams to diagnose the scope and mitigate the intrusion. Crucially, the attack exclusively impacted the website’s external interface and did not propagate to any internal operational systems critical for flight management or passenger processing.
Despite the website disruption, all physical airport operations continued without interruption. Flight arrivals and departures proceeded on schedule across the terminal, with no reported delays or cancellations attributable to the cyber incident. Passenger services—including check-in counters, baggage handling, security screening, and retail operations—functioned normally throughout the attack’s duration, ensuring travelers experienced no direct inconvenience. Airport management emphasized the isolation of the breach to their web domain, confirming that core operational networks controlling air traffic communications, ground support equipment, and flight databases remained uncompromised. IT personnel from Aeroporto di Bologna’s technical division prioritized restoring full website functionality while maintaining defenses against potential escalation attempts. By the close of March 22, recovery efforts remained ongoing, with technicians methodically working to neutralize the attack vectors and reinstate stable web service without compromising backend infrastructure integrity.