Russian hackers blamed for cyber attacks on US airports

Russian hackers have been blamed by US news outlets for a cyber attack on multiple US airports’ websites, including New York’s LaGuardia and Chicago’s O’Hare. The LaGuardia airport website went offline early Monday morning (10 October), NBC News reported. CNN reported 14 similar separate incidents on Monday at US airports, including Des Moines International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. “Early this morning, the FlyLAX.com website was partially disrupted,” LAX said in a statement on the Monday morning website attack. “The service interruption was limited to portions of the public facing FlyLAX.com website. No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.” LAX said its website was back up and running a little before 1 p.m. ET. US government officials have claimed the hackers were located in Russia. A senior US government source told NBC News the incidents had led to a “denial of public access” to airport websites. Flights were not impacted by the attack. CNN noted that the pro-Kremlin hacking group Killnet had listed multiple US airports as targets and had taken responsibility for taking down US state governments’ websites recently.