Tag Archive for: websites

Hackers took down U.S. airport websites, Department of Homeland Security confirms

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Unknown hackers attacked and temporarily shut down the public-facing websites of at least several major U.S. airports on Monday, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to USA TODAY.

The official from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, declined to comment on who might have been behind what appeared to be a coordinated series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents, which did not affect the actual operations of the airports or planes flying into and out of them.

“CISA is aware of reports of DDoS attacks targeting multiple U.S. airport websites. We are coordinating with potentially impacted entities and offering assistance as needed,” said the official, who declined to speak on the record or provide any more information about the cyberattacks and who might have been responsible.

Russian-speaking “hacktivists” from a group calling itself KillNet claimed responsibility for the attacks, which took down websites at 14 airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), according to the official Twitter account of the Russian service of the Voice of America.

Hackers can overwhelm computer servers by sending them many thousands of requests at the same time, disrupting companies and organizations.

Hackers can overwhelm computer servers by sending them many thousands of requests at the same time, disrupting companies and organizations.

DDoS attacks are used to overwhelm computer servers by sending them many thousands of requests at the same time, according to CISA. In this case, the servers hosting the airport sites were swamped with thousands of requests, making it all but impossible for travelers to connect and to get updates about their scheduled flights or book airport services, according to Frank Cilluffo, a former White House cybersecurity official. 

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Cilluffo said such attacks usually are intended to generate attention rather than to cause significant destruction or even disruption, such as taking down airport operations.

“But they are not trivial and in this case they could be the beginnings of a larger trend,” said Cilluffo, director of the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security at Auburn…

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Pro-Russian hackers claim responsibility for knocking U.S. airport websites offline

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A pro-Russian hacker group is taking credit for temporarily taking down several U.S. airport websites on Monday, though there appeared to be no impact on flight operations.

The cyberattacks claimed by Killnet impacted the websites for Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, among others.

The group posted a list of airports on Telegram, urging hackers to participate in what’s known as a DDoS attack — a distributed denial-of-service caused when a computer network is flooded by simultaneous data transmissions.

The group’s call to action included airports across the country, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri.

It was not immediately clear how many of the airports were actually hit and whether all victims’ sites suffered any disruptions.

In a statement, LAX officials told NPR that FlyLAX.com was partially disrupted early Monday morning.

“The service interruption was limited to portions of the public facing FlyLAX.com website only. No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

She added that the airport’s information technology team has restored all services and is investigating the cause. Officials have also notified the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration.

By about 1 p.m. in Atlanta, authorities said ATL.com was “up and running after an incident early this morning that made it inaccessible to the public.” But people on Twitter continued to complain about parts of the site being inaccessible for several hours after the announcement had been made.

Atlanta airport officials said no airport operations had been impacted.

In an earlier post on Monday, Killnet noted other vulnerable U.S. sites that could succumb to similar DDoS strikes, include sea terminals and logistics facilities, weather monitoring centers, health care systems, subway systems, and exchanges and online…

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CIA’s ‘weak’ websites led to capture execution of assets in Iran, China: Report

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A flaw in the ‘covert’ websites of the Central Intelligence Agency compromised the US spy agency’s assets in countries like Iran and China, according to a report by security researchers. The researchers claimed that the internet security flaw led to the deaths of more than two dozen US assets in China in 2011 and 2012 while other assets in Iran were either executed or imprisoned by the regime. The research carried out by security experts at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also said that the flaw could have been detected by an amateur sleuth, British website The Guardian reported. The security experts began probe following a tip from a Reuters journalist.

Joel Schectmann, the Reuters journalist had reportedly tipped the research group about a CIA asset in Iran who had been captured and later served seven years in prison after using the ‘fatally insecure network’. In 2018, two Yahoo News reporters first reported that a system used by the agency to communicate with its assets had been compromised by Iran and China.

However, the researchers said it was not publishing the full report as a move to avoid putting more CIA assets at risk. But the revelations have led to the agency’s handling of digital safety measures to come under scanner. According to the report, at least 885 websites were identified to have been used by the CIA. They were purportedly websites concerned with news, healthcare, weather etc.

The researcher group said an amateur sleuth could have mapped the entire CIA network and attributed to the US administration. According the report, these websites were active between 2004 and 2013. They were not used by the agency recently but a subset of these websites were still linked to the active employees or assets.

Calling out the ‘reckless construction’ of the infrastructure of CIA, the Citizen Lan claimed that the loophole led to the identification and the execution of the agency assets, while risking the lives of countless other individuals linked to it.

A spokesperson of the CIA said the agency takes it obligations to protect the people work with it extremely…

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A simple tool to make websites more secure and curb hacking

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hack
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

An international team of researchers has developed a scanning tool to make websites less vulnerable to hacking and cyberattacks.

The black box security assessment prototype, tested by engineers in Australia, Pakistan and the UAE, is more effective than existing web scanners which collectively fail to detect the top 10 weaknesses in web applications.

UniSA mechanical and systems engineer Dr. Yousef Amer is one of the co-authors of a new international paper that describes the development of the tool in the wake of escalating global cyberattacks.

Cybercrime cost the world $6 trillion in 2021, reflecting a 300% hike in online criminal activity in the past two years.

Remote working, cloud-based platforms, malware and phishing scams have led to skyrocketing data breaches, while the rollout of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made us more connected—and vulnerable—than ever.

Dr. Yousef Amer and colleagues from Pakistan, the UAE and Western Sydney University, highlight numerous security weaknesses in website applications and how these are costing organizations dearly.

Due to the widespread adoption of eCommerce, iBanking and eGovernment sites, web applications have become a prime target of cybercriminals who want to steal individual and company information and disrupt business activities.

Despite a projected $170 billion global outlay on internet security in 2022 against a backdrop of escalating and more severe cyberattacks, existing web scanners are falling way short when it comes to assessing vulnerabilities, according to Dr. Amer.

“We have identified that most of the publicly available scanners have weaknesses and are not doing the job they should,” he says.

Nearly 72% of organizations have suffered at least one serious security breach on their website, with vulnerabilities tripling since 2017.

WhiteHat Security, a world leader in web application security, estimates that 86% of scanned web pages have on average 56% vulnerabilities. Among these, at least one is…

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