Introduction: European Airport Cyberattack DisruptionEuropean Airport Cyberattack Disruption has become a stark warning about how a single digital incident can paralyze air travel across an entire region. When a cyberattack hit a third-party provider that runs check-in and boarding systems, Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin airports were suddenly forced to abandon automated processes and switch to manual procedures, turning a routine travel day into chaos for thousands of passengers. Manual Check-In Chaos at Major European HubsThe attack disabled the software that usually issues boarding passes, prints baggage tags, and verifies passenger data in seconds. Check-in counters quickly turned into choke points as staff had to process every traveler by hand, inspecting documents, writing or manually entering details, and coordinating boarding without their normal digital tools. Lines snaked across Terminal 5 at Heathrow and through departure halls in Brussels and Berlin, with many passengers missing connections or having flights cancelled entirely. Airports and airlines urged travelers to check their flight status and arrive earlier than usual, but even those precautions could not fully offset the disruption. Third-Party Systems: Aviation’s Hidden Weak PointThis incident highlights how deeply dependent modern airports are on external IT vendors. A compromise at a single service provider instantly cascaded across multiple countries, underscoring that cyber resilience is only as strong as the weakest contractor in the chain. While Frankfurt Airport remained unaffected, its relative stability simply underscored how different technical setups and better-segmented systems can limit the blast radius of a cyber event. Suspected Russian Cyber Activity and Cisco VulnerabilitiesThe disruption fits into a wider pattern of hostile cyber activity against critical infrastructure. Security agencies have previously...