Fakoyejo Olalekan
Russian-speaking hackers, Killnet, attacked four US airports amid the ongoing war between Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s country on Monday.
Killnet used Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) to flood the airports’ computer servers with phony web traffic, which eventually knocks them offline.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelThe attack by Killnet follows US continued financial support of Ukraine against Russia. While the US haven’t provided its soldiers in the Ukraine war, it has provided capital and weapons to boost Ukraine’s chances against Putin’s country.
The hack affected websites of 4 US airports – Des Moines International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, as well as that of Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
According to reports, the cyberattacks didn’t impact United States’ air traffic control, internal airline communications, and coordination, and transportation security.
About 14 websites were affected, with the attack causing an inconvenience and prevented persons trying to access web domains that discloses airport wait times and congestion.
LAX told ABC News that, “Early this morning, the FlyLAX.com website was partially disrupted.” Adding that, “The service interruption was limited to portions of the public-facing FlyLAX.com website only. No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”
The vice president at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, John Hultquist, told CNN, “DDoS attacks on US airports are favored by actors of varying sophistication because they have visible results, but these incidents are usually superficial and short lived.”
