Every time a “brief technical issue” grounds flights or locks up check-in kiosks, the headlines usually focus on the airline. The story that doesn’t make headlines is the one underneath: a vendor, a subcontractor, or shared infrastructure that nobody outside the security team can see.
That’s not a hypothetical. In the past few years alone, a NOTAM system failure froze departures nationwide, a ransomware attack on Seattle-Tacoma’s port systems rattled an entire airport, a Southwest scheduling meltdown stranded passengers over a holiday, and the CrowdStrike outage grounded flights worldwide. These incidents are all examples that a U.S. Senate hearing cited as evidence that aviation’s brittle, interconnected infrastructure isn’t holding up under pressure. In the same hearing, lawmakers noted that frequent flyer accounts have seen a 166% spike in attacks in just three months, and that a 2020 breach exposed the credit card details of thousands of passengers whose only mistake was booking a flight.
The industry gave itself a B, and that’s the good news
SecurityScorecard’s own research put a number on the problem. Its 2024 Cyber Risk Landscape of the Global Aviation Industry report analyzed 250 major aerospace and aviation companies, including 100 of the world’s top commercial airlines, and found the sector averages a “B” grade for cybersecurity. That’s not a failing grade, but organizations rated “B” are 2.9 times more likely to suffer a data breach than organizations rated “A.” A “B minus” in aviation isn’t a rounding error; it’s a real gap in odds.
The report’s sharpest finding is about where that gap lives. It’s not the airlines themselves dragging the average down; it’s their vendors. Aviation-specific software and IT vendors scored the lowest of any group studied, averaging just 83, and the distribution of scores across the whole industry was left-skewed, meaning a small number of very low scorers were pulling the average down for everyone else. Put plainly, most of the industry is doing fine. A handful of vendors are quietly wrecking the curve, and airlines are exposed to each one.
This isn’t theoretical exposure, either. The same research cited a March 2024 incident in which a threat group calling itself SiegedSecurity claimed to have compromised AirAsia and released roughly 2.2 GB of files that reportedly included vendor email addresses and bank account details, which is proof that a breach at an airline doesn’t just expose passengers. It also exposes the vendors who trusted that airline with their own data. Third-party risk in aviation runs in both directions.
Why point-in-time reviews can’t keep up
Ask a TPRM team at almost any airline how they manage this, and you’ll hear a version of the same story: a supplier list running into the tens of thousands, split across centralized procurement and individual business units that source their own tools; an annual or biannual questionnaire which sometimes running 150–200 questions deep sent out, self-attested, and filed away for a year; and, when an actual incident hits, a scramble to figure out which of those thousands of vendors are even affected, using contact information nobody’s verified since the supplier was onboarded.
That model was built for a slower threat landscape. It isn’t built for one where ransomware groups, in which SecurityScorecard’s research names BlackCat, LockBit, BianLian, and Dunghill Leak, among the more active operators, are treating aviation as an increasingly attractive target, or where a single unpatched vendor system can sit exposed for months between review cycles. A questionnaire answered honestly in January says nothing about what changed in July.
Regulators are Paying Attention
This is no longer a problem the industry gets to manage quietly on its own timeline. The TSA introduced new cybersecurity mandates for the sector in March 2023, and the EU’s Implementing Regulation 2023/203 takes effect in 2026, setting a new global bar for aviation information security risk management. Notably, the TSA’s own move into this space wasn’t abstract policy-making; it followed the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021, which served as a wake-up call that cybersecurity needed to become a bigger priority for critical infrastructure oversight, not just physical security. SecurityScorecard now works directly with TSA’s Surface Operations Cybersecurity Assurance Division, providing the vulnerability monitoring and A-to-F rated assessments that give the agency visibility into the pipeline, rail, and aviation systems it oversees, a relationship that traces back to a 2020 agreement giving Aviation ISAC members platform access to strengthen the sector’s collective defense.
Regulators are asking the same question airline security teams are asking internally: not “did the vendor fill out the form,” but “can you actually show me, right now, what your risk exposure looks like.”
The fix isn’t a better questionnaire. It’s not needing one.
SecurityScorecard’s own researchers, publishing alongside the report, put it directly: “Our research shows airlines are flying blind on third-party risks.” Their recommendation wasn’t “assess more often.” It was to prioritize the vendors driving the risk, focusing on software and IT suppliers specifically, and to expand third-party risk programs to account for how customers and partners can expose each other, not just the traditional one-way vendor review.
That’s the shift TPRM in aviation needs to make: move from a compliance exercise that produces a snapshot once or twice a year to continuous, evidence-based visibility that catches a vendor’s exposure the same week it appears, not the same year.
How TITAN AI Helps Aviation Organizations Build Cyber Resilience, Reduce Vendor Risk, and Achieve Compliance
Aviation organizations need a continuous, threat-informed approach to third-party risk to safeguard flight operations and the supply chain behind them. Building a resilient TPRM program provides visibility into which vendors carry the most risk, surfaces hidden exposure before it becomes an incident, and produces the evidence TSA and FAA oversight actually require.
TITAN AI enables aviation organizations to gain continuous visibility across their entire vendor ecosystem, uncover unreported fourth-party exposure, automate vendor assessments, and align with a threat-informed approach to third-party risk management. With TITAN AI, you’ll be able to:
- See Your Entire Vendor Network: TITAN Watch continuously monitors ground-handling, MRO, and technology suppliers, surfacing unreported vendors and fourth-party subcontractor links that a periodic review would miss.
- Automate Vendor Assessments: TITAN Assess uses AI-accelerated workflows to validate vendor documentation and replace self-attested NIST 800-53 questionnaires with independently verified evidence, cutting manual assessment work by up to 95%.
- Detect and Respond to Active Threats: TITAN Secure detects threats across third-party environments in real time and automates outreach and response tracking across 100+ impacted suppliers at once, before an incident spreads.
- Catch Zero-Days and Leaked Credentials Early: Threat Intelligence identifies confirmed vendor exposure to zero-day vulnerabilities within 48 hours of discovery, and monitors the dark web for leaked credentials tied to your suppliers.
- Quantify Risk in Operational Terms: Strategic Risk Quantification translates technical findings into business impact metrics contextualized to flight operations, so your board and regulators see risk the way your organization actually experiences it.
- Prioritize What Actually Matters: Policy-Driven prioritization applies business context like flight-critical systems and service criticality to technical signals, so your team works on the vendors introducing real risk as a priority.
- Share Evidence Without the Back-and-Forth: Trust Center gives you a living, real-time record of your security posture to share securely with regulators and internal stakeholders, cutting down ad hoc audit requests tied to TSA and FAA oversight.
- Scale Without Adding Headcount: MAX Services puts a Vendor Risk Operations Center behind your program for expert-led monitoring and supplier coordination during major incidents.
