Seven German airports were hit by a cyberattack on Thursday, leaving their websites unreachable. This comes just one day after a major IT failure at Lufthansa, caused by a drill cutting through a Deutsche Telekom fiber optic cable bundle, left thousands of passengers stranded.
Why it matters: This isn’t the first time airports have fallen victim to a DDoS (denial-of-service) attack. In a DDoS attack, high volumes of internet traffic are directed to targeted servers by “hacktivists” to knock them offline. These types of cyber-attacks are increasing in frequency, leaving airports on high alert.
- Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, Erfurt-Weimar, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin were among the airports whose websites were impacted.
- Attacks like these lead to travel chaos and reverberate to many other industries due to the interconnected nature of the travel industry.
- Cyberattacks are often a precursor to a future data breach allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in software, steal passwords, or use malware to gain access to confidential customer information.
