Russian regional airline disrupted by suspected cyberattack

Russian regional carrier KrasAvia said on Thursday that some of its digital services were disrupted by a system failure — the latest incident to hit the country’s aviation sector amid a wave of suspected cyberattacks.

The Krasnoyarsk-based airline said its specialists were “working to minimize risks to the flight schedule and to restore services to normal operation as quickly as possible.” As of Thursday evening local time, its website was down, online ticket sales were suspended, and passengers were advised that digital check-ins were unavailable at airports.

Despite the outage, KrasAvia said flights were operating on schedule. The airline largely serves central Siberia and Mongolia.

The company did not acknowledge a cyberattack, but told local media the malfunction resembled the outage that struck Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot in late July. Aeroflot suffered major flight delays and cancellations after its IT systems were crippled in a suspected operation claimed by the pro-Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and the Belarusian Cyber Partisans.

The groups said they had destroyed Aeroflot’s infrastructure and stolen vast amounts of data, including flight records, internal call audio and surveillance material. Russian authorities did not confirm the cyberattack or the authenticity of the leaked data.

A regional Telegram channel, Borus, on Thursday published what it said was a screenshot of a defaced KrasAvia webpage. The image showed the logos of Aeroflot and KrasAvia crossed out above the caption: “We haven’t even started yet …” alongside the emblems of other Russian airlines. A bird icon resembling Silent Crow’s avatar also appeared in the picture.

Recorded Future News could not independently verify the screenshot. Neither Silent Crow nor the Cyber Partisans have publicly claimed responsibility for the KrasAvia incident.

Cyberattacks on Russia’s aviation sector have become more frequent since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In 2023, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, said it had hacked Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s civil aviation authority, which was forced to resort to pen-and-paper after its network was disabled. HUR also this year claimed to have breached the systems of state-owned aircraft manufacturer Tupolev, shortly after Ukraine launched drone strikes on Russian airbases.