CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Websites for O'Hare and Midway Airports are running once again after they were disabled in a cyber attack that targeted a number of major airports around the country Monday.
The sites were knocked offline by what’s known as a denial of service attack, according to Jerry Irvine, the Chief Information Officer at Prescient Solutions in Chicago. He said the websites were overloaded by traffic from fake web users.
“They just had a lot of computers that they took control over and had them talking to the websites at the airports — they talked so much that they couldn’t answer to anybody,” Irvine said. “As a result, the websites went down.”
A Russian hacking group is reportedly responsible for the shutdowns.
Irvine, who’s also a member of the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force in Chicago, said, “This was definitely a warning shot.”
He said the attack could be used to find other weaknesses.
“So, they go in and they attack the forward-facing websites and then start looking at the other things that they may be able to go out and attack as a result of it,” Irvine said.
Airports aren’t alone in experiencing cyber attacks, he added.
“There’s other organizations that are being hacked now, as well. It’s not just airports,” said Irvine. “There are multiple local, federal and state government sites that are seeing all kinds of compromising types of activity going on right now.”
The Chicago Department of Aviation said the cyber attack did not impact security or operations at either airport.
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