Pro-Russian hacker group Killnet claimed responsibility for the IT failure of German carrier Lufthansa, adding that following a “rat experiment,” it now knows how to stop navigation of any airport in the world.
Germany's flagship carrier Lufthansa experienced a severe IT fault on Wednesday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. The company initially attributed the incident to the damage caused to several of Deutsche Telekom's glass-fiber cables during construction work in Frankfurt.
However, it now seems that the failure could have been a result of a planned cyberattack. The alleged leader of the hacking group KillMilk announced their affiliation with the attack to the Russian website Gazeta.ru, which belongs to the state-owned company Sberbank.
“We killed the Lufthansa employee corps network with 3 million requests per second of fat data packets.
These were experiments on rats that were successful.
Now we know how to stop any navigation and technical equipment of any airport in the world.
Who else wants to supply weapons to Ukraine?”
Three more major airports experienced disruptions on Thursday, including Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, and Dortmund. The reason for the failure remains unclear. However, a spokesperson for Dortmund airport attributed the incident to a likely hacker attack.
According to reports, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack might have caused the failure.
Killnet has recently been rather active, disrupting communication between NATO and military aircraft supplying aid to victims of the deadly Turkey-Syria earthquake.
Killnet commonly opts for DDoS attacks to target victims. As such, they have already struck Lithuania, a NATO member bordering Russia, as a way of intimidating one of the most notorious European opposers of the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine. Similarly, they targeted Estonia in what was named the largest attack since 2007.
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