After a large-scale hacker attack, Russia’s largest airline Aeroflot has almost completely lost its operational capacity: IT systems are down, dozens of flights have been canceled, and crews are returning home. It is unknown when operations will be resumed.
After a large-scale hacker attack, Russia’s largest airline Aeroflot has almost completely lost its operational capacity: IT systems are down, dozens of flights have been canceled, and crews are returning home. It is unknown when operations will be resumed.
«We’ve been sitting on the plane with the pilots for two hours now — we can’t even refuel the plane without the computer system,» one of the Aeroflot flight attendants described the situation in these words.
After a large-scale hacker attack, the internal IT infrastructure of Russia’s largest airline completely crashed, causing a real collapse at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and other company offices.
On the night of July 28, according to employees, all corporate computers stopped working. No systems are functioning — from flight planning to aircraft refueling records. Only those flights are taking off for which calculations were made before the attack began. Some of the crews were simply sent home, and office workers are «sitting idle.» Even the electricity supply has disappeared in the village of Melkisarove, where Aeroflot facilities are located. It was probably turned off intentionally to block access to the networks.
According to insider information, employees were prohibited from using corporate email and office computers until further notice, and crews temporarily switched to Telegram to communicate with management.
Amidst this chaos, Aeroflot’s press service released a statement stating that flights are being operated with «forced restrictions.» Passengers on canceled flights will be able to get a refund or reissue tickets only after IT systems are restored. People who cannot fly continue to pile up at Sheremetyevo. Only special categories of passengers are currently being served.
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation confirmed that the destruction of the systems was the result of a hacker attack. A criminal case has been opened, and Aeroflot officials have been threatened with liability for negligence. The statement notes that the hacktivists «may be associated with unfriendly states.»
The attack by the hacker groups Silent Crow and «Cyber guerrillas BY», according to them, lasted almost a year and ended with the complete destruction of 7,000 servers, the theft of terabytes of data, the blocking of critical systems and the paralysis of the company’s work. At the time of publication, Aeroflot was unable to respond when it would resume normal operations.
We previously wrote about how law enforcement agencies from 12 countries successfully took down over 100 servers and issued arrest warrants for key figures in the Russian hacker group NoName057(16), which has been carrying out DDoS attacks on critical infrastructure and government institutions around the world since the start of a full-scale invasion.
