A cyberattack on Russian state-owned flagship service Aeroflot precipitated a mass outage to the corporate’s pc techniques on Monday, Russia’s prosecutor’s workplace mentioned, 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 duty for the cyberattack.
It is likely one of the most disruptive cyberattacks to hit Russia because the 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 firms — noteably the state-owned Russian Railways — however regular companies have resumed inside hours.
Pictures shared on social media confirmed tons of of delayed passengers crowding Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the place Aeroflot relies. The outage additionally disrupted flights operated by Aeroflot’s subsidiaries, Rossiya and Pobeda.
Whereas many of the flights affected had 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 might comply with.
Russia’s Prosecutor’s Workplace later confirmed {that a} cyberattack had precipitated the outage and that it had opened a felony investigation.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov known as studies of the cyberattack “fairly alarming,” including that “the hacker menace is a menace that continues to be for all massive firms offering companies to most people.”Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
Silent Crow claimed it had accessed Aeroflot’s company community for a 12 months, copying buyer and inner information, together with audio recordings of cellphone calls, information from the corporate’s personal surveillance on staff and different intercepted communications.
“All of those assets are actually inaccessible or destroyed and restoring them will presumably require tens of thousands and thousands 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 techniques, and insinuated that Silent Crow might start sharing the info it had seized within the coming days.
“The private information 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 mentioned.
The Belarus Cyber-Partisans informed The Related Press that they’d hoped to “ship a crushing blow.” The group has beforehand claimed duty for plenty of cyberattacks, and mentioned in April 2024 that they’d been capable of infiltrate the community of Belarus’ major KGB safety company.
“This can be a very large-scale assault and one of the painful when it comes to penalties,” group coordinator Yuliana Shametavets mentioned. She mentioned that the group had been making ready the assault for a number of months, and had been capable of 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 help, 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 confronted mass delays over the summer time on account of Ukrainian drone assaults, with flights grounded amid security considerations.
Associated: Hackers Declare to Have Infiltrated Belarus’ Predominant Safety Service
