Pro-Russian group claims responsibility for Kentucky government website outages – 89.3 WFPL News Louisville

A professional-Russian state hacker group claimed accountability for widespread outages of Kentucky’s authorities web sites Wednesday.

A number of Kentucky state web sites have been unavailable Wednesday, greeting customers as a substitute with a 503 error, an indication that the web site can not talk with the server it depends on. Different states noticed related web site outages, together with Colorado and Mississippi.

The professional-Kremlin hacker group Killnet claimed accountability for the outages in a Wednesday morning put up on the social media platform Telegram, as beforehand reported by CNN. 

The group’s Telegram put up is titled “USA OFFLINE,” together with “F*ck NATO.” In Russian, the put up lists a dozen states the group claims to have focused, together with Kentucky.

“Kentucky (breakdown of all on-line companies),” the put up reads. 

In Kentucky, downed web sites ranged from the Kentucky Board of Elections webpage to the Kentucky Division of Schooling web site. Most have been restored by the top of the day. Web sites for Kentucky’s state courts have been down a part of Thursday as properly. 

503 errors might be indicators of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault. DDoS assaults flood a web site’s server with requests, overloading the server and blocking entry for respectable customers. Nevertheless, 503 errors additionally present up when tech points are afoot or throughout scheduled upkeep.

In a press release emailed Wednesday, Kentucky Interactive Common Supervisor Carlos Luna instructed WFPL that state web sites have been “experiencing irregular site visitors, leading to intermittent interruptions.”

“We proceed to analyze and are working with the commonwealth to mitigate the difficulty,” Luna mentioned within the assertion, supplied by a spokesperson.

Kentucky Interactive is a non-public firm that runs the state’s on-line companies.

A supply within the FBI confirmed to WFPL the company is investigating however was not approved to supply remark.

Killnet has taken accountability for different cyberattacks in a number of international locations it perceives as hostile to Russian President Vladimir Putin, together with Japan, Estonia, and Latvia. 

Based on the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity agency EclecticIQ, Killnet hackers are “novice customers with zero or restricted expertise,” and injury from Killnet assaults is often momentary.

“Killnet possesses the sources to efficiently conduct short-lived Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults however lacks the capabilities to execute assaults that impair community infrastructure for an extended interval,” reads a weblog put up by EclecticIQ workers.

A Kentucky Interactive spokesperson mentioned the group would supply extra data on the outages Thursday afternoon.

This story could also be up to date.

Ryland Barton contributed to this report.