Hackers caused a major traffic jam in Moscow after they abused the Russian ride-hailing app Yandex Taxi to get dozens of taxis to the same location at the same time (through Shame). The attack took place on September 1, and traffic towards Kutuzovsky Prospect – an already busy boulevard – came to a standstill.
A video showing lines of taxis seemingly trying to reach the same destination was widely shared on Twitter and reddit on Thursday. Although Moscow is known for its heavy traffic, it is number two as the world’s busiest city in the world last year – this incident had nothing to do with the capital’s typical traffic patterns.
“On the morning of September 1, Yandex.Taxi was faced with an attempt by attackers to disrupt the service – several dozen drivers received bulk orders to the Fili region,” Yandex Taxi said in a statement to the Russian state company TASS. The ride-hailing service, which is owned by Russian internet giant Yandex, added that the outage lasted about 40 minutes and that the “algorithm for detecting and preventing such attacks has already been improved to prevent similar incidents in the future.” .” Yandex did not immediately respond The edge‘s request for comment.
Yandex has yet to confirm who carried out the attack, but the hacktivist group Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the jam on Twitter. It says it is working with Ukraine’s IT military, a loosely organized group of hacktivists that had the Ukrainian deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov helped shape when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Anonymously declared a “cyber war” against Russia earlier this year, and later claimed it had hijacked Russian TV channels with images of the war considered ‘illegal’ in the country. Hacktivists have since leaked large amounts of data and terabytes of emails from the country’s government agencies and major corporations as part of an ongoing cyber campaign against Russia.
