According to Vice, hackers caused a major traffic jam in Moscow after they used the Russian ride-hailing app Yandex Taxi to hail dozens of taxis to the same place at the same time. The attack took place on September 1, and traffic to Kutuzovsky Prospect, already a busy boulevard, came to a standstill.
A video was widely shared on Twitter and Reddit on Thursday showing taxi lines trying to get to the same spot. While Moscow is known for its heavy traffic (it was ranked second as the world’s busiest city last year), this event was not about the capital’s typical traffic patterns.
“On the morning of September 1, Yandex.Taxi encountered an attacker’s attempt to disrupt the service – several dozen drivers received bulk orders to the Fili region,” Yandex Taxi told Russian state agency TASS. The ride-hailing service, owned by Russian internet giant Yandex, added that the jam took about 40 minutes and that “the algorithm for detecting and preventing such attacks has already been developed to prevent similar incidents in the future.”
Yandex has yet to confirm who carried out the attack, but hacktivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility in a statement on Twitter. They say they are working with the Ukrainian IT Army, a somewhat organized hacker group that Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov helped form when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Anonymous declared a “cyber war” against Russia earlier this year and said it later broadcast footage of the war, deemed “illegal” in the country, on Russian television channels. Hacktivists have since leaked huge amounts of data and terabytes worth of emails belonging to the country’s government agencies and large corporations as part of an ongoing cyber campaign against Russia.
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