Hackers caused a massive traffic jam in Moscow using a ride-hailing app

Hackers induced a significant site visitors jam in Moscow after exploiting the Russian ride-hailing app, Yandex Taxi, to summon dozens of taxis to the identical location on the similar time (by way of Vice). The assault occurred on September 1st and had site visitors heading in the direction of Kutuzovsky Prospect — an already busy boulevard — caught at a standstill.

A video exhibiting traces of taxis seemingly making an attempt to get to the identical vacation spot was shared broadly on Twitter and Reddit on Thursday. Whereas Moscow is understood for its heavy site visitors — it ranked quantity two because the world’s most congested metropolis on the planet final yr — this incident wasn’t associated to the capital metropolis’s typical site visitors patterns.

“On the morning of September 1, Yandex.Taxi encountered an try by attackers to disrupt the service — a number of dozen drivers obtained bulk orders to the Fili area,” Yandex Taxi stated in an announcement 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 forestall comparable incidents sooner or later.” Yandex didn’t instantly reply to The Verge’s request for remark.

Yandex has but to substantiate who carried out the assault, however the hacktivist group Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the jam on Twitter. It says it labored with the IT Military of Ukraine, a loosely organized group of hacktivists that Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov helped kind when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Nameless declared a “cyber warfare” towards Russia earlier this yr, and later claimed it hijacked Russian TV channels with footage of the warfare that’s thought-about “unlawful” within the nation. Hacktivists have since leaked troves of knowledge 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.