It recruits volunteers to conduct DDoS attacks, organizing them into squads with names such as 'Kratos,' 'Rayd' and 'Zarya.'

Threat monitoring firm Digital Shadows writes that KillNet began as the name of a DDoS tool, and the group behind it transformed from criminal service providers to Kremlin-aligned hacktivists. The group's emergence highlights how any war in the information age will have a cyber component - but also how annoyance and defacement rather than fully developed cyberwarfare has been a hallmark of the Russia-Ukraine war to date (see: Major Takeaways: Cyber Operations During Russia-Ukraine War). Some of those groups act in closer allegiance with Moscow than others, possibly constituting a front for state-sanctioned hacking rather than true hacktivism. federal government concluded earlier this year. KillNet is one of a handful of cybercrime groups that have declared allegiance to Moscow, the U.S. The Russian-language group, whose Telegram channel features memes, digital stickers and news coverage of its exploits, has also called for DDoS attacks against marine terminals and logistics facilities, weather monitoring centers, the healthcare system and online trading systems. Other airports experiencing some difficulty today with public-facing websites include Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Denver International Airport. A KillNet Telegram channel earlier posted a ' list containing more than two dozen targets. Both are owned by the city of Chicago and share the web domain of. The group, KillNet, also took responsibility last week for a series of DDoS attacks that temporarily disabled a handful of American state government websites.Īmong the dozen airports affected by the Monday attack are Chicago's O'Hare and Midway international airports. See Also: New OnDemand | A Better Way to Approach Data Backup and Recovery

The underground tunnel between concourses B and C in Terminal 1 of O'Hare International Airport (Image: Thomas Hawk/ CC BY-NC 2.0Ī pro-Russian political hacking group is claiming responsibility for distributed denial-of-service attacks that knocked offline the public websites of several major U.S.

War brokers hacks