Last weekend, the Sacramento Regional Transit District website was targeted with Ransomware disrupting the schedules of bus and light rail passengers. The authorities immediately apologized for the inconvenience caused to the transit users via Twitter and said that no personal data was compromised in the attack.
However, Wendy Williams, a spokesperson from the Transit department said that the systems will be offline throughout this week due to a cleanup task took after the attack. This is likely going to affect most of the credit card transactions, access to online accounts and the regular schedule info display.
Later, the same source added that the IT department of the Sacramento’s Transit Department has succeeded in scrubbing malware from half the systems and so there is a strong hope of the systems being back by the middle of this week.
Note- All rail and bus operations will continue to function as normal.
Mark Lonergan, the Deputy General Manager of Sacramento’s Transit Department confirmed that the servers of the transit department were attacked with malware who were demanding a $7000 ransom in bitcoins for not deleting the encrypted files.
Mark added that his department has a disaster recovery plan in place to keep the business continuity operations intact. So, paying ransom remains out of question for the department.
Note- The Sacramento Regional Transit District shortly known as RT is an agency responsible for public transport in the region of Sacramento, California. The said transit authority operates buses in 60 routes and also serves the public with light rail systems. RT is said to be the 16th busiest rail system in the whole of the United States.
