Birmingham and London City Airports encountered technical difficulties today as their websites suffered outages, with Russian hacker groups UserSec and Anonymous Russia claiming

responsibility for the cyberattacks. Visitors attempting to access the websites were met with error messages, indicating server issues and 'bad gateways,' making it difficult to connect to the sites.

UserSec, known for previous cyberattacks on entities such as Swedish airline SAS, posted on its Telegram page that it deliberately caused the disruption, referring to it as putting one of the UK's largest airports to sleep in the name of Russia. Anonymous Russia, in collaboration with UserSec, also joined in the attack on UK airports and took credit for bringing down Birmingham Airport's website.

The motivation behind the cyberattacks appears to be retaliation for Nato's support of Ukraine during the ongoing conflict. Russian hacker groups have been targeting western countries as a response to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Both Birmingham and London City Airports have acknowledged the website issues and are investigating the cause of the outages. However, airport officials have stated that normal operations have not been affected by the cyber incidents.

This incident highlights the ongoing concerns surrounding cyber warfare and the need for robust cybersecurity measures to safeguard critical infrastructure and sensitive data. Photo by Santeri Viinamäki, Wikimedia commons.