A civil-military organization coordinating commercial traffic between 41 states, including the EU and their national air-traffic control entities, European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol has confirmed that its website has been under attack since April 19, causing interruptions to the service availability.
Although Eurocontrol said that that had been no impact on European aviation, the outage jammed the agency’s internal and external communication systems. It forced some smaller airlines and the organization’s 2,000 employees to use older technology to manage flight schedules, including a fax-era backup system.
The Eurocontrol spokesperson did not mention which systems had been affected and when the organization expected to be fully online.
It is yet to confirm that pro-Russian hacker Killnet was responsible for the apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. However, the pro-Kremlin crew claimed responsibility for the attack on its Russian-language Telegram channel, stating, “From today, a Eurocontrol marathon is being held, lasting 100 hours.”
Notably, Killnet claimed responsibility last October for knocking over a dozen US airports’ websites offline in a large-scale DDoS attack. And more recently, in February, the miscreants similarly downed German airport websites.
