Some of the Unites States’ largest airports were targeted for cyberattacks by someone within Russia on Monday, according to a senior U.S. official briefed on the situation.
According to officials, the systems targeted do not handle air traffic control, internal airline communications, coordination, or transportation security.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says it’s “too soon to know.”
“We just don’t really understand fully who’s behind this, what the motivation was, certainly at what level — if any – Kremlin officials were aware. We just don’t know,” Kirby told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview Tuesday on “Good Morning America.”
“We’re grateful that no airport operations were affected, no safety was put at risk, but we’re looking into this,” he added. “We’re going to investigate this, we’re going to try to get to the bottom of it and obviously we take cyber resilience very, very seriously, regardless of what happened at these airports.”
More than a dozen websites for U.S. airports were impacted by the “denial of service” (DDoS) attacks, which essentially overload sites by jamming them with artificial users.
A pro-Russian hacker group took credit for the attacks.
The cyberattacks, claimed by Killnet, impacted the websites of Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, among others.
According to NPR, the group posted a list of airports on Telegram, urging hackers to participate in what’s known as a DDoS attack, a distributed denial-of-service caused when a computer network is flooded by simultaneous data transmissions.
The group’s call to action included airports across the country, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri.
It was not immediately known how many of the airports were actually affected and whether all victims’ sites suffered any disruptions.
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