Hackers forced more than a dozen US public airport websites offline

Hackers believed to be based in temporarily forced around 14 public-facing websites for US airports offline on Monday. The LaGuardia, O’Hare and LAX websites were among those targeted, and most are back online. A senior US government official said that air traffic control, internal airport communications and other critical operations were not affected, but travelers looking for security wait times or other information may have been inconvenienced, according to . An LAX spokesperson affirmed that “no internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”

“On Monday October 10th, 2022 at approx. 0300 hours there was a denial of service incident lasting 15 minutes that resulted in intermittent delays accessing the LaGuardia airport website,” a Port Authority spokesperson told ABC News. “The Port Authority’s cybersecurity defense system did its job by detecting the incident quickly, addressing the problem in 15 minutes, and enabling us to alert others by notifying federal authorities immediately. There was no operational impact to any Port Authority facilities.”

The incident, said to be the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have been pinned on pro-Russia hacker group Killnet. The hackers are not believed to be government actors, however. There’s no evidence that the Russian government was involved in this incident, a cybersecurity analyst said.

Both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Transportation Security Administration are monitoring the situation, reports. CISA noted it didn’t have any worries about airport operational disruptions.