Hackers caused a main traffic jam in Moscow after exploiting the Russian ride-hailing app, Yandex Taxi, to summon all out there taxis to the identical location on the identical time (via Vice). The assault occurred on September 1st and had traffic heading in direction of Kutuzovsky Prospect — an already busy boulevard — caught at a standstill.
A video exhibiting traces of taxis seemingly attempting to get to the identical vacation spot was shared extensively on Twitter and Reddit on Thursday. While Moscow is thought for its heavy traffic — it ranked number two because the world’s most congested metropolis in the world final 12 months — this incident wasn’t associated to the capital metropolis’s typical traffic patterns.
Someone hacked #YandexTaxi and ordered all out there taxis to Kutuzov Prospect in Moscow
Now there’s a large traffic jam with taxis.
It‘s like James Bond movie. pic.twitter.com/IatuAEtA2i
— Russian Market (@runews) September 1, 2022
“On the morning of September 1, Yandex.Taxi encountered an try by attackers to disrupt the service — a number of dozen drivers acquired bulk orders to the Fili area,” Yandex Taxi said in a statement to the Russian state-owned outlet TASS. The ride-hailing service, which is owned by the Russian web big, Yandex, added that the jam lasted about 40 minutes, and that its “algorithm for detecting and stopping such assaults has already been improved to stop related incidents in the longer term.” Yandex didn’t instantly reply to The Verge’s request for remark.
Yandex has but to verify who carried out the assault, however the hacktivist group Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the jam on Twitter. It says it labored with the IT Army of Ukraine, a loosely organized group of hacktivists that Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov helped form when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Anonymous declared a “cyber war” towards Russia earlier this 12 months, and later claimed it hijacked Russian TV channels with footage of the battle that’s thought of “unlawful” in the nation. Hacktivists have since leaked troves of information and terabytes value of emails belonging to the nation’s authorities businesses and main companies as a part of an ongoing cyber marketing campaign towards Russia.