Several U.S. Airport websites were temporarily offline on Monday after a pro-Russian hacker group apparently hacked into their systems, according to The Associated Press.
The group Killnet took credit for taking down websites for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, among others.
“We noticed this morning that the external website was down, and our IT and security people are in the process of investigating,” Andrew Gobeil, a spokesman for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, told the AP Monday.
“There has been no impact on operations.”
While the websites for the airports were down, it appeared that there was no impact on flight operations.
Killnet called on other hackers to join in the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack happens when multiple online devices are used to overwhelm a website with data transmissions.
According to NPR, the group asked hackers to attack airports in 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 clear how many of the airports were attacked.
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