Cyberattacks force over a dozen US airport websites offline

Websites for more than a dozen US airports were temporarily brought offline by cyberattacks on Monday morning, with Russian-speaking hackers claiming responsibility for the disruption.

About 14 public-facing websites for a number of sizable airports, including LaGuardia airport in New York City, were targeted and inaccessible to the public. Most have since been brought back online.

The hack has been attributed to a group known as Killnet, Russian hacktivists who support the Kremlin but are not thought to directly be government actors, according to CNN. The group favors distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which work by flooding computer servers with traffic to render them non-functional.

The Los Angeles international airport website also appeared to be affected by the cyberattack, CNN reported.

A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesperson told CNN that the agency is monitoring the issue and assisting affected airports.

But officials have not tied the cyberattack to any foreign state, Reuters reported.