Killnet listed multiple US airports as targets

Terrorism could transform aircrafts into weapons of death and destruction, now hacks are being used as weapon in furtherance of an ongoing war effort. The reply to sanctions can be hacks is the modern-day digital age war story. Russian hackers have taken down 14 US airport websites, and how it would unfold further no one knows. Hacks have a psychological angle too, of keeping the whole system on a cliffhanger.

Websites for more than a dozen US airports were temporarily brought offline by cyberattacks on Monday morning, with Russian-speaking hackers claiming responsibility for the disruption. There are 14 websites including the one for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

The hacking group known as Killnet listed multiple US airports as targets. It stepped up activity to target organizations in NATO countries after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine. The loosely organized “hacktivists” are politically motivated to support the Kremlin but ties to Moscow are unknown.

The type of cyberattack used by Killnet is known as “distributed denial of service” (DDoS), in which hackers flood computer servers with phony web traffic to knock them offline. DDoS attacks are favoured by actors of varying sophistication because they have visible results, but these incidents are usually superficial and short lived. Besides the ransomware attacks for money and for peddling intellectual property at times, cyber war or in a more localised way, all it seems hacks have become a tool of an ongoing physical war.

The DDOS attacks hit these websites after US airport website domains were listed on Killnet Telegram channel on Sunday. It was done with custom software designed to overwhelm the websites with false web traffic. The official said that the interruption caused an “inconvenience” for travellers attempting to access information.

As a consequence of this attack, the websites became inaccessible to the public. The LA Airport website was one of the impacted ones. The actual travellers were thus not able to get updates about their scheduled flights or book airport services.

The same group have earlier been involved in cyber-attacks in Lithuania and also on US defence giant Lockheed Martin. As per CNN they had also *hacked various government websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi* earlier.

It was formed around March 2022. It is a pro-Russian hacker group with specialization in DOS and DDOS attacks towards government institutions and private companies in several countries. This has all taken place during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA