Pro-Putin goons claim responsibility for blowing US airport websites offline

Russian miscreants claimed responsibility for knocking more than a dozen US airports' websites offline on Monday morning in what appeared to be a large-scale, distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. At 0800 PT, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport's website was down and Chicago O'Hare International Airport's …

[martinusher]

Sounds like a load of bluster

If you live in the US then "blowing US airport websites offline" is a nonsense. Flying is a bit of a crapshoot at the best of times and usually its so chaotic and random that an individual airports website 'going down' would be lost in the noise, I doubt if a traveler would notice.

[heyrick]

Re: Sounds like a load of bluster

This.

On sunny days it's amusing to watch the planes fly over and imagine the sorts of stories of people on those aircraft.

So I pop over to the website of the nearby (about 40 miles away) little airport. Which on any given day may or may not be working, may or may not be showing the right day. Or the right flights of that day. Once it was telling me that several flights were inbound from Asia (Thailand, Singapore, etc). Nope, not possible. Any plane of that size trying to land at this airport is going to end up in a lake on the other side of a motorway.

One time I phoned the airport. The person was like "what, already?" and told me what planes were coming in and when. All seven of them.

So taking out an airport website is going to be an inconvenience more than "oh god the planes are falling out of the sky".

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Sounds like a load of bluster

But suppose they escalated this to taking out the customer support sites of our telecoms infrastructure ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sounds like a load of bluster

Our telecoms infrastructure has customer support sites?!?!?!!?

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Sounds like a load of bluster

What critical infrastructure will these terrorists target next? Grocery-store websites? Lowes.com? Myspace?

It's like we're living in ... uh ... some era in which mild inconveniences went unnoticed by most of the populace.

[normal1]

Re: Sounds like a load of bluster

Define "down" compared to the normal lack of functioning....

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Not for the first time, Russia has picked a bad target and failed.

[Jellied Eel]

Yeh, wouldn't want to go burning bridges, would we?

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s annoying…

…that as civilized countries with massive armies we have to put up with all this nonsense. But, that’s why the West is/was successful in leading the free world.

Leave stupid emotional retaliation to the dictators of this world…

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: It’s annoying…

However if you happen to work at a Russian centrifuge plant it might not be a good idea to pick up any USB flash drives you find in the parking lot.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: It’s annoying…

Considering "the west" have been banging on about already being "at [cyber] war" for quite some time, we don't seem to here very often about "unattributed" attacks on Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean sites. Are "the west" simply "playing by the rules" and carefully exfiltrating data rather than doing like for like DDoSs against their public facing systems? Or is just that it's not news here when their sites get knocked offline?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: It’s annoying…

Or fewer targets. How do you knock out North Korea's social media sites?

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: It’s annoying…

The true brilliance of Juche is revealed!

[aregross]

DDos?

That's all you got? Bring It!

[BOFH in Training]

Re: DDos?

I thought DDoS and malware attacks are just considered "normal" since prior to covid, regardless of events in Russia or elsewhere?

[Michael Hoffmann]

It's either that, or...

Think of it from the attackers point: they desperately need something, anything to show.

Or it's mobilisation and off to the meatgrinder.

"Ivan Ivanovich, you are behind on your hack quota. I have here your draft order."

"I will double my efforts, tovarich, I will take down all their airports!"

"See that you do, or else"

OK, so the commander didn't get that it's not actually the *airports* taken down, but Ivan got a reprieve.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh those Russians!

Airport websites knocked offline due to excessive traffic.

Border crossings over worked by excessive traffic.

Idiots

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Fine

Another good argument for unplugging sections of the internet that host attacks. Amazon, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and Google are practically replaying the Yahoo and Cyberpromo days of thinking that you can do anything you want because you're too big to fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fine

Capital idea. We should break up internet at country level and impose a digital biometric passport for everyone who wants to access a site hosted in another country. That would stop those pesky 'state sponsored bad actors'.

/sarcasm

<joke>

anon because of those who can't take a joke

[BOFH in Training]

Re: Fine

Nah, easier to enforce RFC 3514 internationally.

That will fix things!

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

/joke

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Questionable selections

Not rehashing or refuting the arguments above that targeting airport websites was a joke, but some of the airports picked were rather pointless to boot.

Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix -- all good targets. Minneapolis is even a good choice, being a Delta (formerly Northwest) hub.

But West Michigan Regional? Should have been Wayne County / Detroit Metropolitan (DTW) -- another Delta hub and the biggest airport in the state. Missed the mark, there.

(The Twitter images don't cover if any NYC airports were part of this. In my opinion, they should have been top priority.)

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Questionable selections

I dunno – regional airports might actually have useful websites. If I were flying out of CMX (and I have, once) I might want to take a quick look at the site to see if it was closed due to snow. That's quite possible, even in October.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Questionable selections

I think the NYC airports were possibly skipped as they are already, well, they are in NYC so it's like being hacked, mugged and abandoned already, so really, nobody would even notice.

[disgruntled yank]

Somewhat pointless

I think that we have used the DCA website within the last couple of years to confirm availability and price of parking. I don't remember ever looking at the IAD website, on the other hand, though we have flown out of it at least as often.

[Anonymous Coward]

what do they expect?

ohh noo, they messed with websites, we should just let putin murder everyone he wants to, or he might have skids ruin our web sites, ohhh nooo

pffft.

[jamsenbrneq]

let's ban them!

they are probably satisfied with their local tourism, for ordinary citizens it’s okay if they don’t fly anywhere except for those few star partners. whom they are still on good terms with! I do not mind if they sit at home, and we put a ban on them!