A cyberattack on Russian state-owned flagship provider Aeroflot prompted a mass outage to the corporate’s pc methods on Monday, Russia’s prosecutor’s workplace stated, forcing the airline to cancel greater than 100 flights and delay others.
Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and Belarusian hacker activist group the Belarus Cyber-Partisans, which opposes the rule of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, claimed accountability for the cyberattack.
It is among the most disruptive cyberattacks to hit Russia for the reason that begin of the nation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Earlier assaults have focused Russian authorities web sites and different main Russian corporations — noteably the state-owned Russian Railways — however regular providers have resumed inside hours.
Pictures shared on social media confirmed a whole bunch of delayed passengers crowding Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the place Aeroflot is predicated. The outage additionally disrupted flights operated by Aeroflot’s subsidiaries, Rossiya and Pobeda.
Whereas a lot of the flights affected have been home, the disruption additionally led to cancellations for some worldwide flights to Belarus, Armenia and Uzbekistan.
In an announcement launched early Monday, Aeroflot warned passengers that the corporate’s data expertise system was experiencing unspecified difficulties and that disruption may observe.
Russia’s Prosecutor’s Workplace later confirmed {that a} cyberattack had prompted the outage and that it had opened a prison investigation.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov known as experiences of the cyberattack “fairly alarming,” including that “the hacker risk is a risk that continues to be for all massive corporations offering providers to most of the people.”
Silent Crow claimed it had accessed Aeroflot’s company community for a 12 months, copying buyer and inner knowledge, together with audio recordings of telephone calls, knowledge from the corporate’s personal surveillance on workers and different intercepted communications.
“All of those assets are actually inaccessible or destroyed and restoring them will probably require tens of tens of millions of {dollars}. The injury is strategic,” the channel purporting to be the Silent Crow group wrote on Telegram. There was no technique to independently confirm its claims.
The identical channel additionally shared screenshots that appeared to indicate Aeroflot’s inner IT methods, and insinuated that Silent Crow may start sharing the information it had seized within the coming days.
“The private knowledge of all Russians who’ve ever flown with Aeroflot have now additionally gone on a visit — albeit with out baggage and to the identical vacation spot,” it stated.
The Belarus Cyber-Partisans informed The Related Press that they’d hoped to “ship a crushing blow.” The group has beforehand claimed accountability for quite a lot of cyberattacks, and stated in April 2024 that they’d been in a position to infiltrate the community of Belarus’ predominant KGB safety company.
“It is a very large-scale assault and one of the painful when it comes to penalties,” group coordinator Yuliana Shametavets stated. She stated that the group had been making ready the assault for a number of months, and have been in a position to penetrate the Aeroflot community by exploiting varied vulnerabilities.
Belarus is a detailed ally of Russia. Lukashenko, who has dominated Belarus with an iron hand for greater than 30 years and has relied on Russian subsidies and assist, allowed Russia to make use of his nation’s territory to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and to deploy a few of Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Russia’s airports have repeatedly faced mass delays over the summer time on account of Ukrainian drone assaults, with flights grounded amid security issues.
