European air traffic control confirms website 'under attack' by pro-Russia hackers

Europe's air-traffic agency appears to be the latest target in pro-Russian miscreants' attempts to disrupt air travel. Eurocontrol confirmed on Friday its website has been "under attack" since April 19, and said "pro-Russian hackers" had claimed responsibility for the disruption. "The attack is causing interruptions to the …

[Will Godfrey]

What do these people actually hope to achieve?

Most countries are pretty much run by psychopaths, who are not likely to just give up. If anything they are more likely to double down.

[t245t]

"pro-Russian hackers"

I would have thought the first rule of hacking was to not announce yourself on the Intertubes /s

[Timbo]

But surely...

..and good IT professional, can design a solution whereby specific "foreign" and/or "unknown" IP addresses (that is those who are not authorised to access said systems) can be easily prevented from accessing anything by a fast acting firewall/gateway system?

For sure a massive and targeted DDoS campaign (using VPNs no doubt) could flood said gateway(s), but by now, with so many miscreants causing untold havoc, there must be a better way of protecting any important infrastructure/systems?

for reference:

https://phoenixnap.com/blog/prevent-ddos-attacks

[xyz123]

Re: But surely...

You are spot on.

Many government systems simply only accept connections from either IP ranges THEY own (supplying home broadband to their VIP users so they control the connection) or ranges of IP addresses contained inside their country by local ISPs.

Done right, the government system can have ACTUAL users connect via modern encrypted VPN, and the VPN software itself ONLY allows the user to use the software if they are on an IP address INSIDE that particular country.

All the government officials have to do then, is if they require to work abroad is obtain special PCs/laptops that have been heavily restricted in what they can access outside of the country.

[Frank Bitterlich]

Re: But surely...

ATC is a massively complex system, with many stakeholders involved - airlines, airports, ... Not easy to restrict to specific IP ranges or networks. And commercial off-the-shelf solutions like CloudFlare typically can't be applied either, as they focus on HTTP and similar traffic.

That said, ATC systems are often ancient, and I wouldn't be surpised if that was part of the current problem.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Unplug it

Can we finally start unplugging networks that continuously participate in attacks? The past few years have gotten so bad that many major networks don't even take abuse complaints any more. Hosts stay compromised indefinitely.

Unplug them all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Putin’s Script Youth

Too young for the front

Easily lead by propaganda

Snappy uniforms

[xyz123]

If these are State sponsored attacks on a NATO countries infrastructure, thats technically an act of war against NATO and could trigger Article 5.

Basically Russia is trying to crash commercial jets and kill hundreds if not thousands of people.

[Stork]

Did you read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

The systems that actually control the ATC are not dependent on the internet, and there are multiple fallback systems in place to prevent any one system issue causing an ATC outage. All instruction to aircraft are currently voice relayed too. These ATC and voice systems are all based on different infrastructure and products to prevent 'common mode' issues.