Russia's main airport in St. Petersburg says its website was hacked

One of Russia’s busiest airports said on Friday its website was knocked offline in a cyberattack, the latest disruption to hit the country’s aviation industry this week.

Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest air hub, said access to its website was restricted following the hack but operations at the airport were unaffected. “Check-in for flights is proceeding as usual,” the airport said in a statement, adding that specialists were working to restore the service.

The airport did not provide details about the nature of the attack or whether it affected other parts of its digital infrastructure.

The incident came a day after Siberian regional carrier KrasAvia reported that a system failure had disrupted some of its online services. While the airline did not confirm a cyberattack, it told local media the malfunction resembled the outage that crippled national carrier Aeroflot in late July. 

Aeroflot suffered widespread flight delays and cancellations after its IT systems were disabled in an intrusion claimed by pro-Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and the Belarusian Cyber Partisans.

It is not immediately clear whether the Pulkovo breach and the earlier disruptions were connected or carried out by the same threat actors.

Russia’s aviation sector has faced a steady rise in cyberattacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

In 2023, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, said it had hacked Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya, forcing it to revert to pen-and-paper after its networks were disabled. Earlier this year, HUR also claimed responsibility for breaching systems at state-owned aircraft manufacturer Tupolev, shortly after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted Russian airbases.