Originally Posted by
Name User
Rick I think you make some great points. Part of the security in operating aircraft nowadays is that there are no external links that can be hacked and control the aircraft.
There has been an instance where a passenger hacked in via the entertainment system and was able to control the aircraft indirectly by changing thrust on the engines. That was on an A320.
Airbus and the government denied that happened. I tend to believe them, it would be far harder than you might think for some random dude to pull off. Possible to get into the system (always possible unless physically and electromagnetically isolated). But knowing what to do once you got in would require professional work experience on that software. It's not HTML, you can't read the source code so you'd have to go after specific memory registers. So you would have had to work on the source code before it was compiled, and that only happens at the mfg.
With access but no knowledge, you could start deleting things until the plane malfunctioned. But taking control of anything would be harder.