Image credit – Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez/S.F. Examiner
If you are living in San Francisco and you take the light-rail system, you might have noticed that over the week, particularly on late Friday and Saturday, the systems were down and that MUNI riders were greeted with signage that read, “Out of Service” and “Metro Free” on the ticketing machines.
According to a report from the San Francisco Examiner, it seems that this is because the system was hacked. This was confirmed by one of MUNI’s employees who did not want to be named. The hack message reads, “You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted. Contact For Key(cryptom27@yandex.com)ID:681 ,Enter.”
Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson, said they were investigating the situation but they did not confirm whether or not they had been hacked. According to Rose, “We are currently working to resolve the situation. There is an ongoing investigation and it wouldn’t be appropriate to provide additional details.”
The Verge reached out to the hackers via email, in which they said, “we don’t attention to interview and propagate news ! our software working completely automatically and we don’t have targeted attack to anywhere ! SFMTA network was Very Open and 2000 Server/PC infected by software ! so we are waiting for contact any responsible person in SFMTA but i think they don’t want deal ! so we close this email tomorrow!”