This past weekend, airports across Europe, faced major disruption after a cyber attack on Collins Aerospace’s MUSE check-in and boarding system. Passengers at hubs like London Heathrow, Berlin, and Brussels endured long queues, flight delays, and cancellations as airports scrambled to switch to manual processes.
The incident is a drastic reminder of how dependent critical infrastructure has become on digital systems – and how vulnerable those systems can be.
When relying on online solutions to run your businesses, it is vital to have a failover system in place that can pick up the slack in the event of a major incident, like the cyber attack over the weekend.
What This Means for Businesses
These incidents aren’t isolated. They expose prominent risks:
Dependency on third parties: Many organisations rely on software providers, hardware vendors, or external service firms — this opens up major vulnerabilities. If your supplier is hit, you may also suffer.
Growing sophistication of attacks: Ransomware, malicious software, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and insider threats are evolving. What might once have been a simple disruption is now multi-layered.
Real business impact: Delays, lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, regulatory risk, and damage to brand trust all flow from incidents. The airports’ problems meant massive logistical headaches, cancellations, costs, and reputational fallout.
Why Businesses Should Act Now
If you haven’t already, here are urgent reasons to put cyber security and backup plans at the top of your agenda:
Mitigate risk before it hits.
Waiting for disaster is costly. Proactive cyber hygiene — patching systems, securing third-party integrations, enforcing strong access controls — reduces exposure.Ensure continuity and recovery.
A robust backup strategy means when systems are compromised, your business can bounce back faster. Downtime is expensive; data loss can be worse. Recovery plans often differentiate the businesses that recover vs those that collapse under the cost.Comply with regulations & customer expectations.
Legal rules, data protection regulations (GDPR, etc.), increasingly require you to have proper safeguards. Customers expect their data to be secure; transparency about security and recovery matters.Protect brand and reputation.
Even if no ransom is paid, just being seen to fail in responding to such incidents can erode trust. In industries like travel, logistics, etc., reliability is part of the product.Prepare for escalation
Threat actors are evolving toward more disruptive strategies: not just stealing data or demanding ransom, but causing visible, public disruptions. Being unprepared is not an option.
What Businesses Should Do: Cyber security & Backup Action Plan
Here’s a high-level checklist for what you should implement immediately and build into your long-term resilience plan:
Cyber Security
• Audit all software / systems, especially third-party providers.
• Patch known vulnerabilities.
• Use multi-factor authentication.
• Limit privileges; segment networks.
• Train staff: phishing, social engineering awareness
Backup & Recovery
• Adopt a strong backup strategy
• Protect backups from tampering where possible.
• Test restores regularly to ensure backups work.
• Include disaster-recovery / business continuity planning.
How can we help?
At Immervox, we don’t just provide solutions — we partner with you to build resilience. Our team of experienced cyber professionals will work alongside your business to identify vulnerabilities, implement robust security measures, and equip your employees with the knowledge they need to stay cyber smart. From proactive threat monitoring to training and awareness programmes, we ensure your organisation is prepared to defend against any attack that may come your way.
