Russia's Yandex taxi-hailing App was hacked, leading to a chaotic traffic stalemate in Moscow.
CTOnews.com, Sept. 4 (Xinhua)-- A large group of tourists to Moscow were caught in a traffic jam on Thursday. While this is common to the world's second-largest congested city, the incident was actually a cyber attack caused by a group of premeditated and organized hackers.
According to Vice, the cyber attack led to dozens of taxis being summoned at the same time. The attack, which took place on September 1, brought a large number of vehicles to Kutuzovsky Prospect to a standstill, and the street was already very congested.
A spokesman for Yandex confirmed that "there are attackers trying to disrupt the service." It is said that "dozens of drivers have received large orders from Moscow's Fili district of Moscow district, a main road outside central Moscow."
The spokesman added that after his security team "stopped trying to cause man-made traffic jams and improved algorithms to detect and prevent such attacks to prevent similar incidents in the future", the traffic jam was resolved in "less than an hour".
Although there is no official confirmation of which hacker group carried out the attack, Anonymous, a well-known hacker group, claimed through Twitter that it had cooperated with another hacker group, IT Army of Ukraine.
CTOnews.com has reported that Uber, the global leader in ride-sharing service, and Yandex.Taxi, a ride-hailing service owned by Russian giant Yandex, announced in 2017 that their operations in Russia and several Eastern European countries would be merged into a new company, with Uber holding 36.6% of Yandex Taxi holding 59.3%.
According to public information, Yandex.Taxi is an international company owned by Russian IT giant Yandex, which operates taxi aggregation and food technology businesses in Russia, CIS, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. At the same time, the company is one of the world's leading developers of self-driving technology.
Yandex has been listed on Nasdaq since 2011. The company focuses on developing technologies based on machine learning. Yandex.Taxi is an independent private limited liability company owned by Yandex Group, with ride-hailing services operating in more than 1000 cities, including Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Serbia, Israel, C ô te d'Ivoire, Finland, as well as Ghana and Norway.
