LONDON: The websites of more than a dozen airports in the US were inaccessible on Monday morning after they were targeted by Russian-speaking hackers, CNN has reported.
Air travel was not affected by the incident, although some people seeking information may have been inconvenienced.
Chief of Staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Kiersten Todt insisted there was “no concern about operations being disrupted,” as he addressed a conference in Sea Island, Georgia.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was among the 14 websites affected. The Los Angeles International Airport website did appear offline for a while but was restored shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
The hacking group known as Killnet has listed multiple US airports as targets. It has stepped up its activity to target organizations in NATO countries in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The “hacktivists” are politically motivated to support the Kremlin but ties to Moscow are unknown. The group last week claimed responsibility for knocking offline the websites of US state governments.
It is blamed for briefly making a US Congress website inoperable in July, and for cyberattacks on organizations in Lithuania after the country blocked the shipment of goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in June.
The group usually floods computer servers with phony web traffic to knock them offline, a method known as “distributed denial of service.”
