The websites of some major U.S. airports were inaccessible early on Monday due to an apparent coordinated denial-of-service attack orchestrated by pro-Russian hackers, but flights were unaffected, according to officials.
The attacks, in which participants flood targets with useless data, were orchestrated by a secretive organization known as Killnet. The organization issued a target list on its Telegram channel on the eve of the attacks.
DDoS attacks, despite being extremely visible and designed for maximum psychological impact, are primarily a noisy annoyance, unlike hacking, which involves breaking into networks and can cause severe harm.
Andrew Gobeil, a spokesman for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, stated, “We observed this morning that the external website was offline, and our IT and security personnel are currently investigating.” There has been no effect on business operations.
Victoria Spilabotte, a Los Angeles International Airport spokesperson, stated that portions of the website’s public-facing side were also affected. No airport internal systems were hacked, and there were no operational interruptions.
The airport alerted the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration, according to Spilabotte, and the airport’s information technology staff is working to restore all services and investigate the cause.
Several additional airports on Killnet’s list of targets reported issues with their websites.
According to a statement released by the Chicago Department of Aviation, the websites for O’Hare International and Midway airports went offline early on Monday, but airport operations were unaffected.
The same group of hackers claimed responsibility for denial-of-service attacks against government websites in many states last week.
John Hultquist, vice president of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity company Mandiant, tweeted that denial-of-service attacks, such as those aimed at airports and state governments, are typically brief and shallow.
“These are not the effects that have kept us up at night,” he remarked.
Such attacks typically indicate that webmasters are not adequately protecting their sites, which now includes DDoS protection service.