The websites of a number of major United States airports were down for some time on Monday after a “coordinated denial-of-service attack” from pro-Russia hackers. While the websites were not active for a few hours, the officials made it clear that no flights were affected by the disruptions.
In the aftermath of the outage, the hacker’s group called themselves ‘Killnet’ and claimed responsibility for the disruption and later, it posted a list of their potential targets on the messaging app Telegram.
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The “Russian hacktivists” are well-known supporters of the Kremlin and according to CNN, they specialise in launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which can hamper t any website.
Most airports notified the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration immediately after the website issues and the resident Information-technology teams started the recovery process.
“No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions,” spokeswoman Victoria Spilabotte for the Los Angeles International Airport told ABC News.
A similar statement was also released by Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
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“We noticed this morning that the external website was down, and our IT and security people are in the process of investigating,” said spokesman Andrew Gobeil. “There has been no impact on operations.”
Disruptions also occurred on the official website of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, but the Chicago Department of Aviation was able to solve the problem within a few hours.
A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesperson told CNN that the authorities are monitoring all the airports on Killnet’s list for any future attacks.
