As the Kremlin continues to watch its once-mighty reputation be torn asunder in Ukraine, some of Russia’s most notorious scoundrels are taking direct aim at the United States…and they’re mucking up the air travel industry while they’re at it.
Russia’s notorious hacking collectives have been wreaking havoc on a global scale for years now, often working to advance the Kremlin’s agenda while maintaining a sort of plausible disconnect to keep the international community from retaliating directly against the Russian government.
The latest such attack has now forced a vast number of American airport websites offline.
A pro-Russian hacker group is taking credit for temporarily taking down several U.S. airport websites on Monday, though there appeared to be no impact on flight operations.
The attacks claimed by Killnet impacted the websites for Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, among others.
The group posted a list of airports on Telegram, urging hackers to participate in what’s known as a DDoS attack — a distributed denial-of-service caused when a computer network is flooded by simultaneous data transmissions.
The organization had some rather large aspirations.
The group’s call to action included airports across the country, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri.
The incident did not affect any internal airport systems, and was restricted to only the customer facing websites associated with these various airports.
