Europe’s Air-Traffic Agency Under Attack From Pro-Russian Hackers
Air traffic isn’t at risk but the attack is ongoing, Eurocontrol said, amid fears about the safety of Europe’s critical infrastructure
Europe’s air-traffic control agency said Thursday that it was under attack from pro-Russian hackers amid fears that Moscow could interfere with the region’s critical infrastructure as its confrontation with the West escalates.
The cyberattack on the agency’s website started on April 19, a spokeswoman for the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, also known as Eurocontrol, said, adding that it wasn’t affecting the agency’s air-traffic control activities.
“Since 19 April, the Eurocontrol website has been under attack by pro-Russian hackers. The attack is causing interruptions to the website and web availability,” the spokeswoman said. “There has been no impact on European aviation.”
A senior Eurocontrol official familiar with the situation said that the agency had ringfenced its operational systems and that air-traffic safety wasn’t at risk. But internal and external communication had been affected, the person added, forcing some of the roughly 2,000 employees to use WebEx and other commercial tools to communicate.
“It’s been a heavy cyber-battle and while operations are entirely safe, doing other things has been difficult,” the official said.
The agency’s website was intermittently unreachable on Thursday evening.
Eurocontrol is a critical part of air-traffic safety in Europe, managing cross-border traffic across airspaces covered by national air-traffic authorities. In addition, its office in Maastricht in the Netherlands provides direct air-traffic control in the upper airspace for that country as well as for Belgium, Luxembourg and northwest Germany for both civilian and military flights.
European authorities have grown concerned that Russia could attack parts of Europe’s transport, communications, and energy infrastructure since it attacked Ukraine in February last year, sparking its biggest confrontation with the West since the Cold War.