Russian Hacktivists Try to DDoS US Airport Websites
At least a few US airport websites went offline on Monday after a Russian hacktivist group claimed it was launching DDoS attacks on numerous airports in the country.
On on its Telegram channel, Russian hacktivist group “Killnet” released(Opens in a new window) a list containing dozens of US airport websites it planned on targeting. The goal has been to overwhelm the targets with a flood of internet traffic, rendering them inaccessible to the public.
The websites for the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, and Des Moines International Airport seem to have been affected. Visiting the O’Hare airport website will trigger a “connection timed out” error. Meanwhile, Atlanta’s airport website shows that it's activated a “security service to protect itself from online attacks.”
In a statement, Chicago O’Hare also confirmed the disruption. “Early Monday, FlyChicago.com and related websites for O’Hare and Midway international airports went offline,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “No airport operations have been affected. City of Chicago IT staff are currently working to restore the website's functionality. The City’s Information Security Office at the Department of Assets, Information and Services is investigating the cause of the outage."
The Atlanta airport's official Twitter account also posted about a disruption in a since-deleted tweet. “An investigation into the cause of the incident is underway,” the tweet said. “At no time were operations at the airport impacted.”
Although Killnet sought to disrupt numerous airport websites, most of targeted sites were still up and running on Monday morning. Meanwhile, Los Angeles International Airport's website was briefly slow to access. A
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