Moscow’s Cable Car services which were opened to the public for the first time was reportedly shut down by hackers via cyber attack. Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the passengers were forced to disembark the vehicles only 2 hours after it opened on Wednesday as the digital systems which were operating the cars were disrupted.
Many Twitter users who were about to take the ride were seen sharing a video of a police officer requesting them to get down the vehicle as it could not operate due to technical reasons. When they tried to inquire with the authorities, they were told that the cable car service was down due to a cyber attack.
The details of the hackers who disrupted the network are yet to be known. But the law enforcement has been pressed into service to identify the culprits as soon as possible.
Note 1- the Cable Car was meant to be a Moscow’s tourist attraction plying on the wire link of Moskva River and was to take passengers to and fro from the Sparrow Hills to the Luzhniki Sports stadium where the Soccer World Cup Final was held in this summer.
Note 2- The service was opened to the public on Tuesday and was supposed to be free for the 1st month.
Note 3- The Cable car was supposed to be opened in May this year to ease the transport glitches of the world cup fans to a certain extent. But a 2-tonne aluminum panel worth 2 million rubles (30,000 USD) was reported to be stolen from the construction site during the course—$1= 66.36 Rubles.
Note 4- In general, if this incident happened in a Western country like UK or US, the fingers could have been easily pointed towards their adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran. But now, as it has taken place in the capital of Russia, the media sources are just seen reporting the incident, instead of playing the blame game.
Note 5- A cable car is a metal compartment meant to transport people from one point to other- usually up & down a mountain. It is suspended via a moving cable which is driven by a motor at one end of the route or at both ends for failover.
Note 6- On Dec 1, 2018, Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin who launched the service in a fancy ceremony said that 760-meter cable car line was down due to Ransomware infection which resulted in the disruption of operations for almost 2 days i.e. from November 28th, 2018 to the next 48 hours. The operations were brought back to life in the last hours of Nov 29th, 2018 after the removal of the malware became successful.
