US airport websites under attack by pro-Russian hackers – 10/10/2022

The websites of several major US airports were temporarily down on Monday (10) after a cyber attack by a pro-Russian hacker group.

This is a denial of service (DDOS) attack that involves overloading the website with traffic.

The actions affected airport websites in several major cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix and St. Louis, as a pro-Russian hacking group called Killnet published a list of websites and encouraged its followers to attack them.

DDOS attacks affected only the public part of websites providing information about flights and services, and had no impact on operations.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport said its website was “continuing to be closed to the public this morning following an incident.”

“Investigation into the cause of the incident is underway,” he added. “At no time were airport operations affected.”

After the temporary outage, most sites appear to be working normally.

Last week, the Gilnet group claimed responsibility for attacks against several US government websites and also targeted other countries opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So far, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has not commented on the case.

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© Agence France-Presse