United Airlines Bans Researcher After 'joke tweet'

United Airlines banned a security researcher from a flight after he tweeted that he might be able to hack the aircraft's systems. Chris Roberts was due to fly from Colorado to San Francisco to talk at a major security conference. Earlier, he tweeted he thought he could deploy the oxygen masks on board.

Despite the ban, United said: "We are confident our flight control systems could not be accessed through techniques [Mr. Roberts] described."

Mr. Roberts is the founder of cybersecurity firm called One World Labs that tries to find vulnerabilities in IT systems and alerts companies about them before they can be exploited by hackers. Mr. Roberts was taken from a United Airline’s flight by the FBI who took his laptop away and then questioned him for four hours.

Chris Roberts had tweeted:
"Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? "PASS OXYGEN ON" Anyone ? :)"

As part of his job, Mr. Roberts had given several interviews to the media in recent weeks in which he commented on the possible weak points of airline systems. He told Fox News: "Quite simply put, we can theories on how to turn the engines off at 35,000ft (10,668m) and not have any of those damn flashing lights go off in the cockpit." He had also told CNN that he could connect to a computer under his seat to view data from the aircraft's engines, fuel and flight-management systems.

BBC:  http://bbc.in/1F6VHZs