Hackers hit spårvagnsystemet Muni in San Francisco this weekend and took a quarter of their computers hostage. As a result of the attack was made public transportation free of charge.
It’s like a scene taken out of a science fiction thriller. On Friday last week discovered responsible of the San Francisco Municipal Railway – often referred to as the Muni – that someone, or a few, had penetrated their system which controls both the barriers that ticket sales.
In the attack was around 2 000 computers and serving – a quarter of all in the company – hostage. According to the site The Verge, the following message have appeared on the screens to some of the computers been hacked: “You Hacked, ALL the Data is Encrypted. Contact For Key(cryptom27@yandex.com ID:681, Enter.
Exactly how the hack was carried out is not yet known, but a possible approach is using a so-called phishing attack, where the malicious code is sent out via e-mail to the company’s employees, or placed on a false website that the staff have been enticed to visit.
As a result of the infringement, which left the latches open and the loading of the debit card impossible, made public transport free for the passengers during the weekend.
the Hackers reportedly demanded the city of San Francisco on a ransom of 100 bitcoins, equivalent to approximately 645 000 sek, for the dekrypteringsnycklar needed to regain control of the system, writes the BBC. But in the moment, it is unclear, however, if lösensumman was paid or not.
Muni has confirmed the attack, but according to a spokesperson from the company should the infringement not have led to any significant impact of the company’s systems, or to any sensitive information about their customers has fallen into the wrong hands.
Even if the hack does not seem to have caused any major damage to the Munis system, now points to several experts on the attack as a clear example of how infrastructure can be knocked out with relatively simple means.
Ransomware
Ransomware or ransomware is a kind of malicious code that infect computers and then lock them up through encryption. In order to regain control over their computer and the content on it – the owner must then pay a ransom, often in the bitcoins to the transaction should not go to track, to the hacker, after the payment, send a decryption key to the person affected.
No comments:
Post a Comment