Croatian officials on Tuesday said the airport in the coastal tourist hub of Split was hit by a cyberattack this week, causing flight cancellations and delays.
The St Jeronim Airport’s IT system experienced technical difficulties around 7:30 pm on Monday evening (1700 GMT), according to airport officials.
The system was rebooted late Monday after an unspecified number of flights were cancelled and delayed, forcing passengers to spend the night at the airport, local media reported.
“It was a cyberattack,” said Transport Minister Oleg Butkovic.
The minister said the facility’s IT system was still recovering in the wake of the attack and that staff were managing the airport “manually”.
Butkovic said the hackers behind the attack had called for negotiations, but said authorities refused to comply.
Experts are working “intensively to eliminate the consequences of the attack”, airport official Pero Bilas said.
“We are in contact with all airlines and together we are looking for alternative solutions,” he added.
The incident occurred just days after a global IT outage caused by an update to CrowdStrike software upended operating systems across the world, causing chaos at airports, banks and financial institutions.
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said it was “classic ransomware”.
“An international group has been identified, in cooperation with partners abroad,” the minister told reporters.
The attackers’ geolocation for now is the Eurasian area, he added.
Airport manager Luksa Novak said earlier that group called Akira claimed responsibility for the attack. Local IT experts linked the group with the Russian-based Conti ransomware group.
The airport authorities said that there were no “significant delays” early Tuesday afternoon, with the facility due to handle around 80 flights and roughly 25,000 passengers over the course of the day.
Last year around 3.5 million passengers passed through the Split airport, most of whom were tourists heading to Croatia’s Adriatic coast.
The facility is the busiest airport in the country during the summer tourism season.
Croatia is visited by millions of tourists annually who flock mainly to its stunning coast dotted with more than 1,000 islands.
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