Just one day after the long-awaited cable car in Moscow opened, it was forced to close after being infected with ransomware.
The new cable car that opened in Moscow promised its passengers free rides for the first month. Unfortunately, as excited would-be passengers waited for their free ride, police officers informed them that the cable car had been temporarily closed for technical reasons.
According to a Russian news agency, the cable car's main server was infected with ransomware that encrypted all the files on the server. The ransomware demanded a payment in Bitcoin to decrypt the files.
According to sources, an unknown person sent a message to the central computer responsible for the smooth operation of the cable cars, asking for Bitcoins to be sent to him to decode the files. The amount he asked for is not clear, as the message stated that the price would be determined depending on the speed of their response to his message. As expected, the cable cars were stopped.
However, this is not the first time that public transport has been paralyzed due to a cyberattack. In November 2016, in San Francisco, the public transport management system fell victim to a similar attack. Many of their systems, including the server responsible for passenger payments, fell victim to the HDDCryptor. As a result, all the data on these systems was encrypted, and as a result, all public transport passengers were able to board for free until the damage was repaired.
