One system, three airports, total chaos

September 19, 2025. Heathrow Airport. Brussels Airport. Berlin Airport.

Three of Europe's busiest airports. All crippled simultaneously.

Not by a coordinated multi-target attack but by one ransomware hit on Collins Aerospace's passenger processing system—vMUSE.

Here's the thing about critical infrastructure: it's only as resilient as its single points of failure.

Collins Aerospace provides the passenger processing platform for airlines across Europe. Check-in systems. Boarding passes. Passenger manifests. One platform, dozens of airlines, multiple major airports.

When ransomware hit vMUSE, it didn't just take down one airline or one airport. The attack cascaded instantly across borders. Check-in counters went dark. Boarding systems froze. Thousands of passengers stranded.

And every airline using that system was dead in the water.

Think about what that means for your organization. How many systems do you depend on that—if compromised—would cascade across your entire operation? How many vendors provide infrastructure so critical that their failure becomes your crisis?

The airports didn't fail at security. Collins Aerospace didn't necessarily fail at security. But someone failed to ask the right question: "What happens when this single system goes down?"

Because it will go down. Maybe ransomware. Maybe a configuration error. Maybe a natural disaster. Doesn't matter. Critical systems fail.

Building resilience means assuming failure.

Map every dependency in your environment. For each one, ask: how long can we operate without this? What's the recovery strategy? What happens if this vendor has a multi-day outage affecting all their customers simultaneously?

Then actually test it. Don't just document your disaster recovery plan—run scenarios where your critical vendors fail. See if your backup systems actually work. Find out how long recovery really takes, not how long you hope it takes.

Most organizations discover their business continuity plans have assumptions that don't hold under real conditions. They find out their "redundant" systems depend on the same infrastructure. They realize their recovery time objectives are wildly optimistic.

The security professionals who survive incidents like Collins Aerospace aren't the ones with the best technology. They're the ones who planned for failure, tested their plans, and knew exactly what to do when critical infrastructure went down.

CISSP Domain 7 covers this: business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident management that assumes critical systems will fail. Not if. When.