The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency gave customers free rides on its Metro light-rail service all day Saturday, a precaution they took after an apparent hack of the agency’s computer system.
Pink “Out of Service” messages shone from the ticket machines at Powell Street station, where Muni operators had taped over paper signs that said “Metro free.”
According to the BBC, cybercriminal have demanded that the agency hand over 100 bitcoins, which is equivalent to $70,000 (approximately £56,000). No ransom is believed to have been paid.
Over the following weekend, most ticket machines at stations across the city were totally offline.
Instead of the usual ticket selection screens, commuters were instead greeted with the message: “You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted. Contact For Key([email protected])ID:681 ,Enter”.
“There’s no impact to the transit service, but we have opened the fare gates as a precaution to minimize customer impact,” Paul Rose, chief spokesperson and media relations manager at SFMTA, was quoted as saying.
Many experts believe that under no circumstances should money be handed over as ransom, instead stressing the need for having in place robust backup, cybersecurity processes and software solutions.
Additionally, they advocate backing up data &emdash; if you don’t pay cybercriminals, and your information remains encrypted, at least you have your backups to fall back on.