Russian-speaking hackers launch cyberattacks at various US airports

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More than a dozen airports in the United States came under cyberattack on October 10. The attackers were Russian-speaking people and belonged to the Russian Federation, international media reported.

Although the systems that were targeted do not handle transportation security, air traffic control, or internal airline communications and coordination, the attacks have left public-facing web domains inaccessible, resulting in congestion and extended airport wait times, ABC News reported.

The first cyberattack to be reported was at the LaGuardia Airport around 3 am ET; the Port Authority had notified the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about the incident. The LaGuardia Airport System has been restored since. Some other airport websites that came under attack were the Des Moines International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Chicago O'Hare International Airport, and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

As per reports, the backdoors that made the airport web system vulnerable to cyberattacks are being fixed by experts at the moment.

Notably, the attacks did not have any real impact on air travel and only people who sought travel information were inconvenienced by the attempt.

The group that hacked the airport websites identify itself as Killnet. They have reportedly stepped up attempts to attack organisations in NATO nations in solidarity with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although the hackers are known to be politically motivated and support Russia, their actual ties to Moscow are unknown.

It is the same group that had knocked US state government websites offline. They have also been accused of attacking the US Congress website a few months ago and of launching cyberattacks on various organisations in Lithuania in retaliation to the country blocking shipment from reaching the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

Killnet’s type of cyberattack is called the “distributed denial of service” or DDoS, which fills the victim’s computer servers with dubious web traffic to make sure they go down.

A CNN report quoted John Hultquist, Vice-President at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, as saying: “DDoS attacks are favoured by actors of varying sophistication because they have visible results, but these incidents are usually superficial and short-lived.”