Russia is on the attack

Several of America's largest airports, including LAX, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, Chicago's O'Hare, NYC's LaGuardia, and Denver International, were targeted yesterday by cyberattacks that knocked their websites offline, but ultimately didn't hamper operations. A senior US gov't official later confirmed the attacks originated from Russia.

🌐✈️ More deets: Over a dozen major airport websites were affected by the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack, which essentially overloads sites by jamming them with artificial users.

It left customers across the US unable to access flight information or booking services for several hours – though the FAA’s air-traffic website showed no indications of any flight disruptions.

• And this probably explains why: the targeted systems don’t handle air traffic control, internal airline communications and coordination, or transportation security, per ABC.

🇷🇺 Who’s to blame?... Killnet, a pro-Russia hacker group, reportedly posted a list of major US airport websites on its Telegram account Monday morning, encouraging its 91,000 subscribers “to commit DDOS on the civilian network infrastructure of the United States of America."

• Also listed by Killnet were websites for hospitals and health care systems, weather monitoring centers, and metro systems across the US. None of which have reported any online disturbances so far this week.

🌍 Zoom out: Russia carried out a series of coordinated missile strikes on civilian areas in major Ukrainian cities yesterday, killing at least 11 people and injuring 89 more. President Vladimir Putin confirmed he ordered the attacks, calling it retaliation for what he alleged was a Ukrainian plot to blow up a $3.7 billion bridge linking Russia to Crimea.