2024 saw a dramatic increase in hoax bomb threats to India's aviation sector

Hoax bomb threats made to the Indian civil aviation sector broke all records in 2024 as their number rose by more than 300 times over the last six years. Almost 60 per cent of these menacing messages were sent using social-media platform X, an official report has said.

A total of 1,019 such threats were received last year as compared to 330 such messages made during the preceding years between 2018 and 2023. The maximum of such messages, 687, were received in the month of October 2024, according to the report accessed by PTI.

Ninety-six such threats were received in June 2024, followed by 57 in April, 51 in November, with the numbers tapering during the rest of the months.

The highest number of such fraudulent threats were issued on X (611), followed by e-mails sent to airport operators, airlines and the CISF (281), verbal (47), phone calls (45), written (29) and text messages (six).

The threats were issued against more than 600 domestic and international flights of multiple Indian carriers, leading to a "major" operational and financial hit to the airlines, the passenger itinerary and comfort and a "mega" scrambling of the security paraphernalia.

PTI reported in October 2024 that the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) under the Union civil aviation ministry has tweaked the procedures to convene the Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) in the wake of these huge numbers of messages being sent over the social media.

The BTAC is a multi-agency platform of various agencies that is convened once a threat call linked to an airport or airline is received.

Of the 1,019 threats last year, agencies declared 86 per cent as non-specific or hoax, 8 per cent as specific or actionable and in the remaining 6 per cent, the BTAC was not convened, the report prepared by aviation security agencies said.

However, all such threats made in 2024 were finally declared hoaxes.

In all the cases, the security paraphernalia deployed at the airports was activated with "limited or full-scale" anti-sabotage and sanitisation checks being undertaken by security personnel and bomb-disposal teams along with sniffer dogs, a senior officer said.

A "peculiar" trend was noticed by the agencies last year as they found that the social-media handles used to issue such threats were "mostly" created minutes before the menacing posts were published. It was also found that multiple airlines and flights were tagged in a single such message posted on X, the report said.

This was an attempt to create "panic and scare" in Indian aviation. The civil aviation sector of any country is the most security-sensitive one and its robustness is directly linked to the country's image and its investment and tourism health, officials in the aviation-security domain said.

A senior officer said the airlines reported that they suffered an estimated Rs 3 crore loss due to each such hoax call that was acted upon in accordance with the standard operating procedures.

The social media-triggered hoax threat messages were purely a "misuse" of the online medium because it provides a fair amount of anonymity to the perpetrators as they deploy the veil of virtual private networks and internet protocol (IP) spoofing, the officials said.

According to the new guidelines issued by the BCAS in October last year, the BTAC will now adopt a "multi-layered" approach to assess threats, determine the "seriousness" of those issued on social media and satisfy themselves about the "credibility" of the sources.

Some additional questions will now be answered by the BTAC before categorising a threat as specific that would lead to the triggering of the established security protocols of diverting an aircraft, sending it to an isolation bay upon landing or just before taking off and conducting fresh anti-sabotage checks of the passengers and their belongings.

The BTAC is part of the Bomb Threat Contingency Plan (BTCP) of 2014 put in place by the civil aviation ministry to deal with bomb, sabotage and hijack threats to the Indian aviation sector, its assets and human resources.