Pro-Russian hackers briefly knock airline websites offline, operations not affected

Public-facing websites for a number of major U.S. airports were taken offline Monday for a brief time after a cyberattack promoted by a pro-Russian hacking group.

Various media outlets reported the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks hit websites of about a dozen U.S. airports, including those in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix and St. Louis.

At this this time, however, it doesn’t appear the hacking affected airline operations, although investigations are continuing. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure & Security Agency and Transportation Security Administration had not commented on the attack as of Monday afternoon.

The airport websites were targeted after the pro-Russian hacking group known as "KillNet" published a list of sites and encouraged its followers to attack them.