On a September weekend in 2025, Europe’s airports slipped abruptly back into a pre-digital era. Self-check-in kiosks froze, baggage belts stalled, boarding gates stopped scanning, and the continent’s major hubs—London, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin—entered an awkward dance of paper forms and long, winding queues.
What the public saw as a “technical outage” was, in fact, a coordinated ransomware attack hitting a single technology provider: Collins Aerospace and its multi-airport check-in system, MUSE.
One breach cascaded across the continent, disrupting operations for hundreds of thousands of passengers and exposing a structural weakness the aviation industry has been quietly nursing for years.
This was not merely an IT failure. It was the moment Europe learned how fragile its digital critical infrastructure has become.
I. A Supply-Chain Breach, Not an Airport Problem
MUSE is a shared industry backbone—an invisible layer of software that orchestrates check-in, boarding, and ground operations across dozens of airports.
Because airports rely on it as a common platform, attackers didn’t need to compromise each airport individually. Once inside MUSE, they had leverage over the entire ecosystem.
This is the paradox of modern operational efficiency:
the more consolidated the digital platform, the more catastrophic its failure.
Regulators quickly labeled the incident a ransomware attack; cybersecurity analysts recognized it as something more troubling—a textbook demonstration of how concentrated dependencies can turn a single compromise into a cross-border aviation shutdown.
Even with swift reaction from airport teams, the constraints were brutally clear:
finite technical support, complex recovery sequences, and a ground-handling workforce forced to improvise in unfamiliar manual procedures.
Under pressure, the operational supply chain simply bent.
II. What Europe’s Airports Actually Lived Through
Within hours, major airports were forced into a synchronized downgrade of their operations.
Check-in slowed to a crawl.
Baggage systems formed bottlenecks.
Security lines lengthened as boarding systems lost their digital backbone.
Brussels Airport alone canceled over 60 flights in a single day.
Elsewhere, peak-hour delays spilled across the network—first affecting hub-and-spoke systems, then rippling into smaller airports as aircraft rotations fell apart.
The visible chaos—crowded terminals, paper boarding passes, manual seat allocations—was just the surface layer.
The hidden cost was far greater: staffing surges, compensation payouts, disrupted schedules, and an industry-wide dent in public confidence.
Digital convenience, built over decades, was rolled back in a weekend.
III. Why MUSE Was Breached: Not a Bug, but an Architectural Reality
It is tempting to focus on the vulnerability exploited in the attack.
But the true vulnerability lay in the architecture itself.
MUSE is a multi-tenant, cross-airport, high-compatibility system—designed to work with dozens of legacy workflows and hundreds of airline IT integrations.
Such systems are indispensable in aviation, but they are also notoriously difficult to keep modernized.
Attackers did not need “the perfect exploit.”
They only needed a system whose complexity made airtight security a perpetual challenge.
This is the uncomfortable truth:
Europe’s critical digital platforms are evolving slower than the threat landscape surrounding them.
And when an industry relies heavily on a single platform, even a minor security lapse can become a continental crisis.
IV. The Real Lesson Isn’t About Monopoly—It’s About the Absence of Security Cooperation
Some commentators rushed to frame this incident as a “danger of supplier monopoly.”
But that framing misses the deeper point.
Concentration is not inherently dangerous.
What is dangerous is concentration without a corresponding industry-wide security cooperation model.
Europe talks endlessly about NIS2, compliance standards, regulatory oversight.
Yet legislation does not create resilience.
Resilience is built on:
- The actual cybersecurity investment suppliers are willing to make;
- Whether they operate a mature, transparent risk-management platform;
- Whether airports and vendors conduct regular, technically realistic joint crisis drills;
- And most importantly, whether each CII operator’s CSO actively drives the supplier toward stronger architecture and incident-response preparedness.
In practice, many critical infrastructure operators still spend more time discussing frameworks than running exercises.
More time writing compliance documents than testing fail-overs.
More time analyzing hypothetical threats than building real, cross-vendor defensive muscle.
Supply-chain security is not a collection of isolated fortresses.
It is a collaborative security fabric, where vendors must share insights, harmonize interfaces, rehearse disruptions, and invest in collective defense capacity.
Without that foundation, neither advanced technology nor strict compliance will prevent the next outage.
V. What CII Operators Must Now Accept: CSOs Must Lead From the Front
The Collins Aerospace meltdown delivered a clear message to every critical infrastructure operator in Europe:
CSOs and CISOs cannot be passive risk managers. They must become architects of resilience, co-designers of security posture, and drivers of joint operational testing.
This means actively leading:
- Cross-vendor failure simulation drills
- Red-team exercises involving the actual supply chain
- Multi-provider redundancy analysis
- Shared telemetry and threat-intelligence programs
- Recovery playbook rehearsals with vendors, not just internal teams
In other words, supply-chain cybersecurity must evolve from a legal obligation into an operational discipline—one that is continuously tested, refined, and strengthened.
Until this shift happens, Europe’s digital critical infrastructure will remain one disruption away from another multi-airport paralysis.
Conclusion: No Single Villain, but a Very Clear Diagnosis
The 2025 aviation outage was not a story of one supplier’s failure.
It was the exposure of a structural reality:
Europe’s critical infrastructure relies on digital platforms whose resilience depends not on regulation, but on cooperation, investment, and sustained joint readiness.
To secure the next decade of aviation—and every other sector classified as critical infrastructure—Europe must foster a supply chain where:
- Vendors invest in real cybersecurity,
- Customers participate in shaping their suppliers’ security posture,
- And the entire ecosystem becomes a coordinated security community rather than a scattered set of technical dependencies.
Only then will the continent’s essential systems be ready for the next disruption.
ZHIDAO.blog 
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