On 20 September 2025 an attack on Collins Aerospace's MUSE system disabled electronic check-in and baggage drop at several European airports, including Brussels, Heathrow and Berlin, forcing manual operations. One shared platform, used by many airports, became a single point of failure for passengers in several countries.
What is confirmed
CERT-EU's September 2025 cyber brief lists the incident under disruption and destruction. It says the attack took out electronic check-in and baggage drop at the airports and forced a switch to manual operations. At Brussels, several flights were cancelled or diverted, and authorities advised that half of the departing flights scheduled for 21 September be cancelled to ease the backlog. The brief does not describe the attackers or their methods.
Beyond that, public detail was thin when this was written. Check primary sources before citing the attack type, the malware family or any arrests.
Why a shared platform matters
A check-in system shared across airports means one vendor's outage lands on many airports at once. Each airport can have its own security, and none of it helps when the shared supplier goes down.
This is a standard supply chain shape. A single provider connects many customers, and the customers inherit its outage.
What the incident shows
- Manual fallback decides the damage. Staff moved to manual processes, and the cost was cancelled flights and long queues. The faster a manual mode runs, the smaller the impact.
- Dependency maps need vendors on them. If your service cannot run without a platform, that platform is part of your risk.
- Shared systems need shared exercises. The airport, the airline and the vendor each hold part of the recovery.
- Backlog is its own incident. After systems return, work queued during the outage takes time.
How to prepare a manual fallback
A fallback only works if it has been tried. Staff need printed or offline copies of the data they would normally see on screen, a way to identify passengers or customers without the system, and a rule for who may declare the switch. Practise it with a real shift, because the first hour of a manual day tends to expose gaps nobody wrote down, such as who holds the key to the room with the paper forms.
Questions to ask your own vendors
- If you are down for three days, what do we do?
- Is our data separated from other customers in your environment?
- How quickly will you tell us, and through which channel?
- Have you tested restoring from a clean backup with a full customer load?
- Do you support a degraded mode that keeps the critical path working?
Where Safeguard fits
Safeguard's asset discovery and compliance evidence automation can help you record which vendors support which services, and what you asked each of them. It does not monitor airport systems. A free scan is at gold.safeguard.sh/scan.
Quick check
Which systems were affected in the September 2025 airport incident?
Electronic check-in and baggage drop at several European airports, including Brussels, Heathrow and Berlin, according to CERT-EU.
Does CERT-EU name the attackers?
No. The brief does not describe the attackers or their methods.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
