Improving Cybersecurity and Visibility for Airport Operations

Why Is Airport Cybersecurity So Important?

Faced with global shocks and growing cyber threats, airport leadership is under pressure to improve cybersecurity, protect expanding digital systems and safeguard passenger services.

Challenges include:

  • Major business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, war-related flight restrictions and extreme weather
  • Climbing fuel costs
  • Rising cyber threats on critical infrastructure
  • Growing cybersecurity compliance requirements
  • Complex, diverse airport subsystems with high node counts
  • Increasingly connected systems and technology adoption
  • Unifying security across IT and OT

To achieve cyber resilience and meet compliance and security KPIs, airports need advanced OT/IoT visibility and security.

The pandemic brought the aviation industry to a dead stop but had the opposite impact on cybercrime. Many experts reported the rise of cyberattacks during this period. This upward trend calls for unprecedented actions to tackle and build resilience for corporate and interconnected systems.

Nick Careen, Senior Vice-President Airport, Cargo, Passenger and Security, International Air Transport Association

Nozomi Networks' Airport Cybersecurity Solution

Good security starts with great visibility. Nozomi Networks leads the industry in OT/IoT visibility and situational awareness.

As you boost your airport cybersecurity initiatives, you’re faced with a vast quantity and diverse set of operational assets across airport subsystems. Where do you start?

The first step is to identify and locate all your assets, and to do it in a way that poses no risk to operations. The Nozomi Networks solution automates asset inventory, no matter the vendor, and delivers the most extensive and accurate asset coverage. We save you time and money by eliminating manual data collection and providing continuous data vs. snapshots of data.

In addition to asset identification, Nozomi Networks improves your situational awareness by creating a live interactive network visualization showing assets, links, traffic, data flows and more.

A clear view of airport subsystems reduces cybersecurity blind spots and security gaps. It helps you see and secure many types of networks with different purposes and metrics, managed by different teams.

Visibility drives confidence. The OT/IoT expertise built-in to the Nozomi Networks solution dramatically improves visibility—thereby helping you improve risk management across all airport subsystems.

Single Asset View with extensive information.
Single Asset View with extensive information.
Portion of interactive Network Visualization Graph.
Network Visualization View displays all assets communicating on your network for real-time awareness.

Secure Your Systems and Stay Compliant

Vantage Alerts and Playbooks script guided remediation efforts to accelerate response.
Vantage Alerts and Playbooks script guided remediation efforts to accelerate response.
Vantage Workbooks show which vulnerabilities create the highest risk exposure and how to prioritize efforts for the greatest impact.
Vantage Workbooks show which vulnerabilities create the highest risk exposure and how to prioritize efforts for the greatest impact.

Airport facilities are important critical infrastructure. Keeping them secure and operational is vital to fully functioning societies and economic prosperity.

An airport’s complex, diverse and dispersed systems are a huge attack surface for threat actors. Cyber threats continue to escalate, with the potential to impact more than just IT networks. Core airport systems could be compromised, and in the worst case, come to a standstill or be taken offline to protect them.

A key requirement for securing an airport is detecting threats. The Nozomi Networks solution detects malware and IOCs by combining multiple types of OT/IoT/IT threat detection and by receiving continuously updated threat and asset intelligence. It helps you respond efficiently to IT/OT incidents with correlated alerts and actionable intelligence that leads to swift remediation.

Our solution rapidly and passively identifies vulnerabilities across a wide range of subsystems. Its dashboards and reports help you efficiently prioritize and address vulnerability risk.

Nozomi Networks helps you achieve compliance or security KPIs with flexible, customizable reports and powerful queries that instantly answer questions about operational data.

Nozomi Networks helps you assess and address threats and risks for airport subsystems. It helps you meet compliance requirements, achieve KPIs and prevent a damaging security breach.

World Economic Forum


With the rapid pace of digitalization, regulations may not keep up with the emerging cyber risks. Aviation-sector organizations need to ensure their cyber risk posture and efforts extend beyond compliance, towards a holistic risk management approach. Source: World Economic Forum

Unify the Management of Airport Cybersecurity Data

Streamlining the security information coming from an airport’s diverse OT, IoT and IT systems can be challenging. Nozomi Networks believes that sharing data between systems is critical for achieving the best possible security and maximum value from operational data. For example, our industry-leading and holistic integrations with SIEM and SOC systems brings missing operational data and contextual security information into IT infrastructure. This results in comprehensive, efficient security management as well as improved security analysis for better decision making. Integrating OT/IoT security monitoring into IT systems and workflows improves security monitoring, analysis and efficiency.
Unify Security for Efficient Management
Airport Cybersecurity

Scale Resilience for Comprehensive Protection

The high numbers of assets and subsystems at airports demand a scalable and flexible solution. For example, a global top five airport that uses the Nozomi Networks solution includes 100,000+ nodes and 20+ subsystems. The Nozomi Networks platform is distinguished by its elegant and simple scalability. And, an extensive range of Guardian sensors facilitates integrating any airport subsystem into your security solution. Data from Guardian sensors is aggregated either into edge or public-cloud Central Management Console (CMC) appliances, and/or into our SaaS platform, Vantage. Either approach results in consolidated, single view OT and IoT risk monitoring and visibility across subsystems. The Nozomi Networks solution scales elegantly and is readily tailored to meet your needs. It allows you to monitor very high numbers of airport assets and subsystems with reduced complexity and cost.

Unlimited Scalability. Unprecedented Flexibility.

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Discover how easy it is to identify and respond to cyber threats by automating your IoT and OT asset discovery, inventory, and management.