RuAviation

Attacks on the domestic booking system Leonardo are regular. In recent months, there have been dozens of them, including about five attempts recorded in September. The attacks are large-scale and unprecedented in terms of the number of resources involved. It is obvious that a real cyber war is being waged against the country, the purpose of which is to damage the Russian IT infrastructure and disrupt the work of the most important industries. This was disclosed by Rostec State Corporation.

Earlier on 28 September, airlines reported about failures in the work of the reservation system Leonardo. Aeroflot, Pobeda, Rossiya, Utair, Ural Airlines and Red Wings faced difficulties with passenger registration at airports. After the system was restored to service, Rostec’s press service said Leonardo had been subjected to a massive DDoS attack from abroad.

“DDoS attacks are coming from the territory of several countries, including Ukraine. At the moment there are small disruptions, but in general the system is holding steady thanks to the actions of our specialists,” Rostec’s press service said.

There have already been examples of collapse of such systems in the world practice. In 2013, the Sabre booking system was paralysed for an hour and a half, which affected more than 300 airlines around the world, including Russian airlines. In 2017, the failure of the booking system of another foreign system Amadeus forced more than 130 carriers from different countries to delay flights.

Rostec believes that the goal of the attackers attacking Leonardo is to repeat these collapses and bring air travel in Russia to a halt. The system has been subjected to hacker attacks regularly in recent months. An in-house information security team has been deployed to repel attacks on the airline reservation system infrastructure. Two additional distributed teams have been brought in to reinforce in the face of unprecedented attacks, where more than one million addresses are involved.

“The main task is to prevent a global system collapse and transport collapse. For this purpose, we are doing everything possible,” the state corporation assured.