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Flight-tracking service Flightradar24 suffers downtime following cyberattack
Popular flight-tracking website Flightradar24 has been targeted in a series of cyberattacks that would appear to be related to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The site was attacked over three distributed denial-of-service attacks that knocked its service offline for hours at a time and at other times caused instability in service provision. The BBC reported today that the site appeared to be improving with intermittent loading errors, and as of now it appears to be working.
“Attacks on our systems continue and while we were able to bring services back for a short time, significant instability due to the sustained attacks has forced us to refocus our efforts to mitigate them,” the site said on Twitter. “Flightradar24 remains unavailable to all users at this time.”
⚠️ For the third time in two days Flightradar24 is under attack. Our engineers are working to mitigate the attack as quickly as possible and we hope to be back tracking flights soon. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience. Updates to follow in thread.
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 28, 2020
Launched in 2006, Flightradar24 has about 2 million users and tracks about 180,000 flights per day. The site provides tools that can identify a plane’s model, flight number, distress signal codes and other details. Both Airbus SE and Boeing Co. are Flightradar24 customers.
The flight-tracking aspect could be a possible motivator with regard to the conflict currently underway in the Caucasus region. The attack is said to have been traced to an IP address in Armenia. According to Aviation Nepal, Flightradar24 was being used to monitor Turkish and Azeri jets by analysts, which means that in theory the system could have been being used by either side to track the movements of the other.
Although Flightradar24 is the leader in the market, the site does have competitors. Among them is FlightAware and, not surprisingly, FlightAware is reporting issues as well.
FlightAware doesn’t say what the issues were, saying only on Twitter early Tuesday that it was “working to fix interruptions in services.” A later tweet stated that the site was “no longer seeing network instability and all services are functioning normally.”
Image: Flightradar24
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