Serious Security Breach in KLIA

The New Straits Times today reported in a news article titled "Red faces over 'phantom' stowaway" that KLIA had a security breach on Thursday 11 Oct 2007 when a man managed to stow away inside the front nose wheel chamber aboard a Singapore Airlines flight from KL to Singapore. The editorial discussed the matter in a bit more detail.

What was even more interesting is that the stowaway did not turn up on any CCTV recordings in KLIA.

So what has this got to do with CIIP? Well the transportation sector is one of the Critical National Information Infrastructure. Physical security is about the most visible of all security measures that anybody can enforce and where there would usually be traceability. If an entity is not able to handle physical security well and is unable to trace back how it happened from their own records, its left to the imagination as to what can happen if cyber breaches of the KLIA systems does occur, since comparatively, cyber intrusions and breaches are harder to detect.

We are not drawing any conclusions but the incident does raise some fundamental questions about the overall security and surveillance measures in such an important infrastructure entity, be it physical security or cyber security.