Russian Hackers Disrupt Over a Dozen Airport Websites in U.S.

Russian-speaking hackers targeted over a dozen major U.S. airports including LaGuardia Airport in New York City, Los Angeles International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The incidents, which were short-lived, downed multiple public-facing airport websites but had no impact on operations at the aerodromes and are believed to be the work of a pro-Russian hacker group known as Killnet, which took credit for the outages, according to John Hultquist, head of intelligence analysis at Google’s Mandiant, and told to ABC News.

The website for Los Angeles International Airport was inaccessible Monday morning but was back online by 9 a.m. EDT.

Officials there told NPR that FlyLAX.com was partially disrupted early Monday morning.

“The service interruption was limited to portions of the public facing FlyLAX.com website only,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement.  “No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”

Killnet, which listed multiple airports in the United States as targets, has stepped up its activities to target organizations in NATO countries following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Members of the group, which refers to itself as “hacktivists,” appear to be politically motivated to support the Kremlin but their ties to Moscow are not known.

While federal officials expressed concern over the incident, they noted that it was not severe.

“Obviously, we’re tracking that, and there’s no concern about operations being disrupted,” Kiersten Todt, chief of staff of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a security conference in Georgia on Monday.

The group has taken aim at government websites as well.

Last week, Killnet is believed to have targeted a number of state government websites, including Colorado.gov and Kentucky.gov, among others.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)