DES MOINES, Iowa — The Des Moines International Airport's website was down early Monday morning due to a cyberattack, airport officials confirmed.
A spokesperson for the airport said the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is when the regular flow of online traffic to a server, or the infrastructure its using, is increased through fake users to a point the server cannot handle.
Iowa State University cybersecurity professor Doug Jacobson likens a DDOS attack to the mad rush at the store before a snowstorm.
"It's very similar to what happens when the entire city decides to go to a grocery store the day before a blizzard," Jacobson said. "But, nobody can get anything; nobody can get in the store!"
However, taking down the airport's website didn't really cause any sort of problems.
"It seems that they didn't really know what they were after because it's not really anything worth attacking," Jacobson said. "They [airport public domain websites] are easy targets, because they're not designed to be critical infrastructure."
The biggest impact to the general public from the cyberattack was travelers couldn't see how many spaces were available at the airport parking lots before making the trek to the terminal.
Kayla Kovarna, a spokesperson for the DSM airport, says the airport remained open and problem-free the entire time the site was down; due to how the network is structured.
"The airport website [flydsm.com] is housed on an outside server, which is one form of protection for us," Kovarna said. "So fortunately here at the airport, our servers remained intact with no issues at all."
The airport added the issue was secluded to their website, and did not affect flights or other operations.
ABC News has reported that several U.S. airports have been targeted by a Russian Federation attacker. The websites for LAX, LaGuardia, Chicago O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta, among others, were also down Monday morning.
A cybersecurity expert told ABC News the pro-Russia hacker group Killnet is believed to be behind the attacks. The group is not affiliated with the Russian government.
The Des Moines International Airport spokesperson could not confirm where the DDoS attack originated, but said the airport was working with its web provider to find out more information as of Monday.
Blue Compass, a West Des Moines based web development company who manages flydsm.com, declined to comment on Tuesday.
This attack differed from the attack that MercyOne; that was a ransomware attack, where the attackers got into the MercyOne system, and stole data. Details in that case are still unclear.