On Thursday morning, Moscow’s busy Fili district turned the positioning of a site visitors jam in contrast to any earlier than it. Motherboard (through The Verge) stories hackers used Russia’s Yandex Taxi ride-hailing app to order dozens of drivers to protection on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, one of many metropolis’s predominant thoroughfares. The act brought on site visitors on a part of the already congested avenue to come back to a standstill for about 40 minutes whereas Yandex labored to handle the state of affairs.
“On the morning of September 1st, Yandex Taxi encountered an attempt by attackers to disrupt the service — several dozen drivers received bulk orders to the Fili district of Moscow,” a Yandex spokesperson instructed Motherboard. In a separate assertion shared with Russia’s state-owned TASS information company, Yandex mentioned it reworked its routing algorithm following the assault to forestall comparable incidents from occurring sooner or later. The occasion is among the first identified situations of hackers exploiting a ride-hailing app to create a site visitors jam.
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Several Twitter accounts claiming affiliation with Anonymous say the hacktivist collective is behind the incident. On Friday, one Anonymous account mentioned the group labored with the IT Army of Ukraine, a volunteer group shaped firstly of the struggle, to hold out the assault.
Anonymous beforehand claimed duty for a cyberattack that took down a number of Russian authorities web sites, together with these belonging to the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defence. “Faced with this series of attacks that Ukraine has been suffering from the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, we could not help but support the Ukrainian people,” the group mentioned on the time.