Ahead of the Breach: Predictive Threat Intelligence in Aviation Inspired by Scattered Spider Attacks

Abstract ―​

Attackers have targeted airports and airlines as a single huge target in cyberspace with anything that serves as a booking system and all the way up to cockpit systems as a target (Lyngaas, 2025). Scattered Spider is one of the most alarming groups since they attack through social engineering, steal credentials, and use ransomware in such a terrific manner (Control Risks, 2025). Our specific setup of a predictive threat intelligence system, focused on aviation, which combines adversarial modeling and machine learning, enabled security personnel to detect Scattered Spider attacks early enough to prevent them before they go out of control. Our model, by having machine-readable indicators, will turn the defence paradigm around, making it proactive. During testing we registered a sudden increase in the detection accuracy along with the low false-positive rates and all in all the improved overall network resilience.