Beginning September 19, 2025, RTX subsidiary Collins Aerospace’s passenger processing platform experienced a systems disruption affecting automated check-in, bag drop, and boarding workflows at several major European airports. For thousands of passengers across London Heathrow, Brussels, Berlin Brandenburg, Dublin, and Cork, the result was chaos: delayed flights, cancellations piling up, and confusion due to a lack of clarity about when things would return to normal. The European aviation sector received a stark reminder of its digital fragility due to its interconnectedness when this single supply chain compromise cascaded into a continent-wide crisis.
The Value of Interconnectedness and Its Fragility
Interconnectedness and shared systems in Europe have great value. They reduce costs through economies of scale. Instead of each country maintaining separate infrastructure for power, transportation, or telecommunications, interconnected networks enable the sharing and optimization of resources across borders. These interlinked systems enable the European Single Market to function effectively, allowing for the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital across borders. However, just like the grid failure at Iberia, digital interconnectedness without careful microsegmentation is highly vulnerable. This vulnerability makes the interconnected and shared critical infrastructure in Europe digitally fragile, whether it is the financial networks like SWIFT or TARGET2, the air traffic control systems that manage airspace across 41 European countries, or the telecommunications infrastructure, which routes mobile and internet traffic through shared submarine cables, satellite networks, and terrestrial fiber.
It is Time to Be Breach Ready
It is now evident that these interconnected systems must be able to isolate digital systems from one another so that cyberattacks in one system do not compromise others. Cyberattacks must be contained where they happen. This is where an identity-aware microsegmentation platform that uses deception on allowed paths contributes to making organizations breach ready.
Imagine a future where interconnected airline, telecom, or financial systems do not inherit the attack surface of an interconnected system but achieve per-airline isolation for passenger processing within the interconnectedness of the European system by using granular microsegmentation. When an intelligent cyberattacker manages to breach the digital supply chain, the attack is detected and instantly quarantined. Because the supplier can contain the attack within the microsegment where it occurs, the supply chain remains unaffected. Airline staff no longer need to switch to manual operations that are slower and error-prone, causing delays, missed connections, and cancellations.
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Time to Act: Steps Toward Breach Readiness
It is extremely essential now to review how the interconnected nature that provides Europe with economic and operational advantages also creates systemic risks where a single point of failure, whether through a cyberattack, technical failure, or physical damage, can cascade across multiple countries and sectors simultaneously.
This can be done by:
- Designing to deny and defend against cyberattacks
- Implementing least-privilege, deny-by-default policies and simulation
- Denying credential misuse and developing rapid isolation playbooks
- Using high-fidelity deception and early forensic telemetry
- Testing and exercising the guardrails (cloud and on-premises)
All this can be achieved by enhancing existing cybersecurity investments in EDR, SIEM, and similar tools by integrating them with a microsegmentation platform that not only understands all possible points of breach, such as data centers, cloud, and OT, but also provides a mechanism to simulate supply chain isolation. Use a digital certificate-based passwordless credential system for all suppliers that can deny credential misuse, and augment all allowed paths with deception AI-enabled lures that can entrap attackers in honeypots.
The world cannot tolerate disruptions like the one caused by Collins Aerospace to European air traffic. We need to be ahead of the attackers. We need to be breach ready.
If you want to know how ColorTokens can help, start a no-obligation consultation with one of our top advisors.
This blog was originally published on Medium.
