Hackers have forced more than a dozen US public airport websites offline

Hackers believed to be based in Russia temporarily took around 14 public US airport websites offline on Monday. LaGuardia, O'Hare and LAX websites were among those targeted, and most are back online. A senior US government official said air traffic control, internal airport communications and other critical operations were not affected, but travelers looking for security wait times or other information might have been embarrassed, according to ABC News. A LAX spokesperson claimed that "no internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions."

“On Monday, October 10, 2022 at approximately 3:00 a.m., a 15-minute denial of service incident caused intermittent delays to access the LaGuardia Airport website,” a spokesperson said. from the Port Authority to ABC News. "The Port Authority's Cybersecurity Defense System did its job of detecting the incident quickly, resolving the issue within 15 minutes, and allowing us to alert others by notifying federal authorities immediately. there has been no operational impact on Port Authority facilities."

The incident, believed to be the result of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, has been pinned on the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet. However, hackers are not considered government actors. There is no evidence that the Russian government was involved in this incident, said a cybersecurity analyst.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Transportation Security Administration are monitoring the situation, reports CNN. CISA has indicated that it is not concerned about operational disruptions at the airport.

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