Re: What exactly does he mean by this?
+1. It does sound like the same sad bloke with "previous loopy claims about hacking an airliner via the in-flight entertainment system.". If not, it's sounding remarkably similar.
Back then (2011? 2014?), there was very little hard evidence of what was actually claimed to have been seen, but when I did later find some allegedly definitive parts of the story, they showed what looked very much like a Solaris login screen as "evidence" [1] that he'd gained access to the on-aircraft network(s). And the audience lapped it up,especially the ones who were quietly delighted that this clown was diverting the audience from the real issues in safety-critical (and other) software and systems, and not just in aircraft.
[1] See if you can find anything useful starting by searching for e.g. "For those who do not know, 747's are big flying Unix hosts. At the time, the engine management system on this particular airline was Solaris based. The patching was well behind and they used telnet as SSH broke the menus and the budget did not extend to fixing this. The engineers could actually access the engine management system of a 747 in route. If issues are noted, they can re-tune the engine in air."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
