On Monday, October 10, “KillNet”, a pro – Russian hacking group, carried out a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, which affected more than a dozen US airport websites of several major US cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and St Louis causing these airport websites to shut down and be taken offline. A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack involves knocking a website offline by flooding it with traffic, AFP reported.
Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport said its website is “up and running after an incident early this morning that made it inaccessible to the public.” “An investigation into the cause of the incident is underway,” it said. “At no time were operations at the airport impacted. “Most of the airport websites targeted appeared to be functioning normally after being temporarily knocked offline.”
KillNet claimed responsibility last week for attacks on several US state government websites, and it has aimed at other countries opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
No immediate comment from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was obtained.
At SIP we were recently instructed to conduct a ‘Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing’ on a Government Customs interactive website. We demonstrated that although they were of the opinion that they were secure, they were WRONG!! As SIP penetrated their system, securing the identification of users, passwords and was able to gain access to other confidential areas of their main server
SOURCE: FORBES | OCTOBER 11 2022
