Ransomware Takes Hundreds of New Ticket Machines Out of Order
Hundreds of newly installed ticket machines have been taken offline by what appears to be a ransomware attack. The affected machines number over six hundred and were installed at train stations in the northern part of England just a couple of months ago.
The self-service ticket machines are operated by Northern Trains - a British government-owned entity. Northern Trains reported the hardware has become the target of a ransomware cyber attack, intended to "extort money". The train management company is currently engaged in an ongoing investigation with hardware supplier Flowbird where the machines originated.
The company further announced that despite the machines going offline and being affected by ransomware, customer data should not be in danger. No customer or payment-related data has been stolen or exfiltrated in the attack, so customers should be able to rest easy.
Anyone who wants to buy tickets can still do that using the web-based service and simply get the tickers online, using their mobile phone or computer.
There is no hard information concerning the type or strain of ransomware that was used in the attack. The company has also not disclosed the amount of the ransom that the hackers asked for, but that is normal, considering the ongoing investigation.
A representative of Flowbird contacted by ZDNet informed the media that the issue was first spotted by using the company's internal "cyber-monitoring systems". Neither company took it upon them to give a specific date when the issue with the ticket machines would be solved.
While an attack of that scale cannot really stack up against the multi-million dollar ransomware jobs that large threat actors have recently pulled off, targeting US companies, it just comes to show that nobody is really safe from the threat of ransomware.
Major ransomware attacks that took place in the past few months include the one against JBS, the hit on Colonial Pipeline, as well as more recently the attack on network service provider Kaseya.
