According to the European aviation authority Eurocontrol, pro-Russian hackers attacked their website and temporarily paralyzed it. Air traffic is not affected.
The European Aviation Safety Organization has been hacked. “The organization’s website has been the target of pro-Russian hackers since April 19,” Eurocontrol said. Air traffic is not affected by this.
A senior Eurocontrol official told the Wall Street Journal that key flight safety systems were shielded. They are not connected to external networks that hackers could use to penetrate.
However, internal communication was affected by the attacks. The 2,000 employees would have had to communicate using other software. The website was intermittently unavailable or taking a long time to load on Thursday. In the organization’s Network Operations Portal (NOP), there was a notice to airlines to submit flight plans through other channels.
Responsible for the upper airspace
Eurocontrol is a European authority that has 41 member states and monitors and optimizes European airspace for air traffic. It is also responsible for the upper airspace in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg as well as its military use in some member states.
According to research by the Wall Street Journal, the Russian hacker group Killnet announced an attack on Eurocontrol on Telegram. The group called on other hackers to do a 100-hour marathon. This could mean a DDoS attack in which a server is bombarded with a flood of requests. In another Telegram post, Killnet is said to have justified its action by saying that Eurocontrol is connected to NATO and supports Ukraine.
