Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot canceled dozens of flights on Monday due to a system malfunction that Ukrainian and Belarusian hackers later claimed was the result of a coordinated cyberattack.
Aeroflot said it was experiencing disruptions to its electronic systems and had to adjust flight schedules, warning passengers of delays and cancellations.
“Customers may encounter issues when accessing our services,” the airline said in a statement. “We kindly ask passengers to monitor real-time updates on airport websites, information displays, and public announcements across the airline’s route network.”
The airline added that its technical team was “actively working to minimize the impact on flight operations and restore all services to normal as quickly as possible.”
As of late Monday morning Moscow time, at least 42 Aeroflot flights had been canceled, according to online flight tracking services.
Ukrainian hacking group Silent Crow and the Belarusian group Cyber Partisans later claimed responsibility for the system malfunction, calling the attack a “long-term and large-scale operation” that led to the “complete compromise and destruction of Aeroflot’s internal IT infrastructure.”
The hackers alleged they had destroyed around 7,000 servers, accessed flight history databases, compromised critical corporate systems, taken control of employees’ personal computers and extracted data from surveillance and wiretapping servers.
Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office later confirmed that a cyberattack was the cause of the system malfunction at Aeroflot, saying it had launched a criminal investigation into the incident. It did not name the hacking groups.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that the reports of the hacker attack were “quite alarming.”
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