Pierluigi Paganini February 17, 2023

Experts are investigating the failures of several German airports after some media attributed them to a possible hacking campaign.

On Thursday, the websites of several German airports were unreachable, experts launched an investigation speculating a possible cyberattack on a large scale against the critical infrastructure.

Ralph Beisel. chief executive of the ADV airport association, confirmed that the websites were hit by a DDoS attack. She added that other systems at the airports were not impacted.

“Once again, airports fell victim to large-scale DDoS attacks,” Beisel said in a statement. “According to the information we have so far, other systems are not affected,”

The alleged cyberattack took place a day after an IT failure caused cancellations and delays for thousands of passengers of Germany’s national carrier Lufthansa at Frankfurt airport.

The attack blocked the websites of the the following airports:

• Hannover Airport
• Dortmund Airport
• Nuremberg Airport
• Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden Airport
• Dusseldorf
• Erfurt-Weimar

Administrators at the airport confirmed that the problems were likely caused by malicious traffic.

“”We are still troubleshooting,” a spokeswoman for Dortmund Airport said, adding it was unlikely that the failure was due to a regular overload.” reported the website DW. “There is reason to suspect it could be a hacker attack,” she added.

In early January, the Pro-Russia group Killnet launched DDoS attacks against the websites of German airports, administration bodies, and banks.

The attacks are the hacktivists’ response to the German government’s decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the decision to send 14 tanks – and allow other countries to send theirs too (which was restricted until now under export regulations) – at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

On February 16, the group called to action on its Telegram channel against the German airports.

In October the pro-Russia hacktivist group ‘KillNet‘ claimed responsibility for massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the websites of several major airports in the US.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, German airports)