AIRPORTS
Defenses That Hold Up Under Real Pressure
Your systems keep passengers, baggage, and aircraft moving. UltraViolet unites red, blue, and purple team capabilities into one program to help you identify and validate exposure, respond to active threats, and keep airport operations running, without adding headcount or disrupting systems that can't go down.
6,000+
IT and OT endpoints under 24/7 monitoring
<1 min
Median response time to critical
Within hours
Custom detection built for a supply chain threat
Pre-authorized
SOC response actions to contain threats
WHY ULTRAVIOLET FOR AIRPORTS
Turn Offensive Findings into Defensive Action
UltraViolet unites offense and defense so each informs the other. Your teams use red team findings to guide blue team action, protect critical airport systems from real-world threats, and demonstrate how well those defenses hold up.
24/7 monitoring and response, with proactive threat hunting, contains threats early to limit disruption to flights, baggage, and passengers.
Customer Outcomes
How a Major U.S. Airport Operator Strengthened Cyber Resilience
24/7 Defense With Experts Embedded in the Team
International Airport Operator
A major U.S. airport operator partnered with UltraViolet to protect approximately 6,000 IT and OT endpoints. Managed SOC and Dedicated Defense expanded coverage, improved detection, and delivered a median response time of under one minute for critical alerts.
The Challenge
- Building an in-house SOC required more staffing and budget than the organization could sustain.
- Limited internal staffing left gaps in overnight and holiday coverage.
- Existing security tools needed integration, ongoing tuning, and operational support.
- Security responsibilities covered airport infrastructure, vendor networks, and terminal operations.
- TSA’s Security Improvement Plan required measurable detection and response maturity.
The Solution
- Integrated 24/7 Managed SOC with the airport’s existing security stack.
- Embedded Dedicated Defense engineers to tune detections and manage platform operations.
- Introduced TORQ automation for alert enrichment and emergency SMS notifications.
- Enabled pre-authorized response actions and provided support during weekend and holiday incidents.
- Supported TSA security planning, regulatory discussions, and improvements to vulnerability management.
Grounded in Regulations, Standards, and Frameworks That Make Security Measurable
We map engagement findings and defensive coverage to established regulations, standards, and frameworks. This gives your team a consistent way to measure exposure, validate progress, evaluate AI risk, and communicate resilience to airport commissions, TSA, and federal partners.
USE CASES WE SOLVE
Aligned to Your Priorities
Start with your highest-priority risks, then align testing, detection, response, and validation to address them. Get practical next steps tailored to airport operations, helping your security team, IT and OT engineers, and SOC protect passenger data and keep terminals and airside systems running.
Named practitioners support SOC operations, detection engineering, SIEM, and third-party risk, using your tools and following your processes. They provide coverage during nights, holidays, and incidents, with documentation to support TSA reviews.
Purple team exercises test adversary techniques in your live environment while the SOC monitors the activity. Together, the teams confirm which attacks are prevented or detected and address gaps before an attacker or auditor finds them.
Connections with airlines, concessions, ground handlers, and technology vendors can introduce exposure. Embedded practitioners assess third-party access and help prioritize weaknesses that could affect airport operations.
Evaluate AI systems and governance supporting passenger services and airport operations through threat modeling, adversarial testing, and program assessment. Identify security gaps and prioritize improvements before deployment and as systems change.
Baggage handling, access control, and building systems can be difficult to patch without affecting operations. Testing is scoped around operational and safety constraints to identify firmware, network, and configuration weaknesses while minimizing disruption risk.
Application security testing identifies weaknesses in parking, Wi-Fi portals, ticketing, common-use check-in systems, and mobile applications to address PCI gaps and reduce the risk of passenger data theft and extortion.
Aviation Threat Advisory
Airline, Tenant, and Vendor Accounts Can Offer a Way In
Iranian state actors, including APT33, have targeted aviation for more than a decade. They don't need complex exploits. They use password spraying, stolen tokens, and help-desk social engineering. UltraViolet's TIDE team breaks down their tradecraft and what to hunt for first.
Frequently Asked Questions
We plan testing around operational continuity, working with your operations team to scope and schedule testing of baggage handling, access control, and building systems. Testing often takes place during maintenance windows or low-traffic periods, with techniques matched to each system’s tolerance.
Where detection validation is in scope, purple team exercises also confirm whether your SOC detects the tested activity. Your team gets clear findings and remediation priorities, with testing designed to minimize operational risk. For one airport customer, this included white-box testing of an isolated OT environment to inform a risk decision about connectivity.
Engagements can produce evidence tied to TSA’s airport security program amendments, including requirements for IT/OT segmentation, continuous monitoring, incident reporting, and implementation and assessment plans.
UltraViolet has participated in developing an airport operator's TSA Security Improvement Plan strategy. That experience can help your team document progress for discussions with TSA.
We work as an extension of your team. Airport partnerships often start with 24/7 coverage that gives your team back its nights, weekends, and holidays, then expand to include named engineers supporting detection tuning and platform operations.
Your team retains ownership and sets direction. UltraViolet adds coverage, expertise, and an adversary perspective to help your lean team run a full security program.
We treat them as part of your attack surface from the first engagement. We assess the access and connections that airlines, concessions, ground handlers, and technology vendors have into your environment. Detection engineering can cover the choke points between their systems and yours, while threat intelligence provides early warning when a supplier incident could affect you.
You gain a clearer view of parts of the airport you previously couldn’t see.
Yes. UltraViolet has joined an airport CIO in briefing city leadership and a CISA representative on critical-infrastructure security.
Engagements provide technical detail your team can act on, alongside clear measures of exposure and progress that commissioners, auditors, and TSA can trust.
Let's Talk About Your Airport Security Priorities
Talk with a practitioner about which defenses remain untested, what attackers would see, and what to address first. Share your priorities and constraints, and we’ll discuss how we’d approach them.
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