Pro-Russian Group KillNet Claims Responsibility for 14 US Airport DDoS Attacks

On Monday, Oct 10, 2022, the internet sites of many US airports had been disrupted owing to a huge-scale marketing campaign of dispersed denial-of-company (DDoS) assaults, in which servers were flooded with web targeted traffic to knock web-sites offline.

The victims involve Los Angeles Global Airport (LAX), Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), as very well as other airports in Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Kentucky, Mississippi and Hawaii.

The DDoS attacks intended that these airports’ general public-going through internet websites have been possibly offline for a couple several hours, intermittent or slow to respond. They did not have any direct impact on airport operations.

Some airport authorities, this kind of as LAX, notified the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI about the incident.

Afterwards that day, the pro-Russian hacktivist group ‘KillNet’ claimed the attack and listed 14 focused domains on a Telegram channel.

This is not the very first time KillNet has used this form of attack. In March 2022, they knocked a US airport’s web-site offline in retaliation for US aid for Ukraine, in accordance to a federal cybersecurity advisory.

However, quite a few security researchers criticized some of the US media’s to start with headlines when the information broke, some of which omitted to mention the attack only impacted the airports’ web sites, while others mentioned that the group was “linked to the Russian Federation.”

“The airport attacks, like the condition govt assaults in advance of them, are what we make of them. DDoS is typically superficial and shorter-lived but also really seen. Their restricted goal is to manipulate our perceptions. These are not the severe impacts that have retained us awake,” John Hultquist, VP of threat intelligence at Mandiant, reported on Twitter.

“A reminder to media that KillNet is [a] bunch of children, not Russian condition cyber abilities,” said security qualified Kevin Beaumont. “You must give coverage equally as you do to [the] IT Army of Ukraine, who DDoS targets in Russia all working day very efficiently, and have finished for months.”

Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com