On Monday morning, more than a dozen public-facing airports websites were offline, making it difficult to access travel information.
CNN confirms that Russian-speaking hackers claimed to be responsible for the data breach.
“Obviously, we’re tracking that, and there’s no concern about operations being disrupted,” said Kiersten Todt, Chief of Staff of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Apparently, there were 14 websites that were disrupted, including Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Report and Los Angeles International Airport–though the sites were restored shortly.
The hacking group goes by Killnet, which listed multiple US airports as targets. The group also fessed up to its doings of knocking US state government officials offline last week.
CNN reports, “Killnet is blamed for briefly downing a US Congress website in July and for cyberattacks on organizations in Lithuania after the country blocked shipment of goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in June.” The type of cyberattack is known as “distributed denial of service” (DDoS), which is a process described as when hackers flood computers servers with fake web traffic, similar to computer viruses.
Since the epic breach, Transportation Security Administration agency is monitoring the current issue.
