Hyas Blog | Unpacking the Collins Aerospace Attack: Infrastructure Intelligence Lessons from Aviation Disruption
When most people think about critical infrastructure, they think about power grids, pipelines, or financial systems. But few industries depend on as many interconnected digital systems as aviation. The recent cyberattack on Collins Aerospace — a key provider of airport operations software — demonstrated just how fragile that ecosystem can be when infrastructure is compromised.
And if you know me, you know that I travel a lot, so this particular incident certainly hit home and more personally than some others.
The disruption impacted hundreds of airports, flight check-in processes, and ground operations systems across Europe and beyond. The target itself wasn’t an airline or an airport but rather a software supplier that sits in the middle of the aviation infrastructure stack. That’s exactly why this incident deserves more attention than it’s getting: it was a supply chain disruption that rippled across an entire sector.
This wasn’t just about one compromised endpoint or a malware blast. It was about network access, privileged communications channels, and trusted systems that quietly underpin global travel. And that’s exactly where infrastructure intelligence comes in.
The Hidden Backbone: Aviation’s Interconnected Infrastructure
Most industries rely on third-party platforms, but aviation goes a step further. Airlines, airports, baggage handlers, logistics firms, and border security authorities all depend on a web of shared systems, many operated by vendors like Collins Aerospace. These include:
- ARINC AviNet and vMUSE for airport communications and passenger management
- Legacy applications and servers still used by ground crews and check-in kiosks
- Private and hybrid networks stitched together with VPNs and outdated routing architectures
- DNS-dependent software services that assume trust and availability
- Vendor-managed identity and access channels
What looks like “one system going down” is actually an infrastructure failure with dozens of dependencies.
What Likely Happened — and Why It Worked
While specifics of the Collins attack haven’t been fully disclosed publicly, enough patterns exist to create a likely “connect the dots” based on precedent:
- Vendor as the attack vector
Threat actors increasingly focus on trusted intermediaries rather than their higher-profile customers. Aviation, like healthcare and energy, relies on software providers with deep and often persistent access into customer environments. - Lateral movement through under-monitored networks
Operational networks often have legacy routing, privileged accounts, and soft boundaries. Once a single access point is compromised, attackers don’t need to break into every airport. The vendor infrastructure becomes a distribution hub. - DNS and domain infrastructure as staging grounds
Compromised or newly registered domains and IPs tied to known threat actor infrastructure often precede an attack, yet rarely trigger alerts until after the damage begins. - Limited visibility into shared infrastructure behavior
Most SOCs and IR teams focus on their own environment. They have little to no ability to see attacker infrastructure patterns before it starts affecting their systems.
These gaps don’t emerge from technology failure; they emerge from a lack of intelligence about the infrastructure behind the systems we trust.
Where Infrastructure Intelligence Could Have Changed the Story
This incident wasn’t unpredictable. The challenge is that too few organizations have visibility into the infrastructure attackers use to stage, deploy, and command their operations.
Infrastructure intelligence addresses that problem by shifting the timeline. Instead of defending at execution, you monitor what bad actors are staging, what they are setting up in advance of their attack, to detect and mitigate threats before they occur.
Here’s how:
Tracking adversary infrastructure before activation
Attackers almost always register domains, acquire IP space, or reuse past infrastructure, often weeks in advance to properly age the assets. These assets can be flagged well before the first intrusion, providing time to proactively address defenses.
Mapping relationships across campaigns
Infrastructure reuse is one of the biggest tells in threat actor behavior. Even if domains rotate, underlying hosts, registrars, certificates, or behavioral patterns don’t. Like everyone else, bad actors often have their own tradecraft that gets automated and thus re-used.
Monitoring DNS signaling for emerging threats
Even highly targeted attacks leave infrastructure exhaust including DNS lookups, anomalous resolution patterns, or subnet behaviors.
The Aviation Industry Isn’t Unique — It’s a Warning
What happened here happened before and will happen again. Any industry with:
- Global third-party dependencies
- Legacy infrastructure hidden under “modern” software
- Multiple network operators and service providers
- Shared authentication and privileged access systems
is one compromised vendor away from a cascading outage. But note that this isn’t a compliance problem. It’s a visibility problem, and one that infrastructure intelligence can help address.
The Future of Resiliency Is Pre-Attack Detection
Security teams have invested billions in SIEMs, EDR, NDR, MDR, and every other acronym in the alphabet. But most of these tools focus on what's already inside the network and/or what’s already public knowledge.
Infrastructure intelligence instead looks outward, at the infrastructure attackers build, control, and operate before they strike.
Imagine a world where operators, and their suppliers, could see:
- DNS activity pointing to malicious infrastructure
- Domains registered to support phishing or C2 before use
- Connections between a new host and previously identified threat actor infrastructure
- Changes in hosting or ASN behavior tied to known ransomware crews or nation-state groups
- Vendor network metadata signaling anomalous traffic patterns
That’s not wishful thinking. It’s now possible, and it’s what organizations adopting infrastructure intelligence are already doing.
What Security Leaders Should Take Away
The Collins Aerospace incident teaches a few hard truths:
- Your risk isn’t just your infrastructure — it includes your suppliers’ infrastructure and the entire supply chain.
- Attacker infrastructure telegraphs intent before exploitation.
- DNS, domains, and hosting metadata are some of the earliest threat indicators available.
- You can’t detect what you can’t see. Increased visibility provides increased capabilities.
- Infrastructure intelligence belongs alongside — not behind — your existing controls.
Final Thought
In aviation, delays measured in minutes trigger headlines. In cybersecurity, delays measured in days are still considered “good response time.”
It’s time to flip that equation.
Infrastructure intelligence gives defenders something they’ve historically lacked: foresight. And as attackers move faster and supply chain compromises become the norm, foresight is no longer a luxury. It’s the new baseline for resiliency.