Transport for London is the latest public body or large corporation to be targeted by cyber criminals. The cyber attack has prompted TfL to seek help from the National Crime Agency.
TfL sent out advisory notes by email last night to hundreds of thousands of passengers: “We are currently dealing with an ongoing cyber security incident. At present, there is no evidence that any customer data has been compromised and there has been no impact on TfL services.
“The security of our systems and customer data is very important to us, and we have taken immediate action to prevent any further access to our systems.
“We are working closely with the relevant government agencies to respond to the incident.”
The cyber attack on TfL follows previous hacks against some central London hospitals on June 3, when they were targeted by a Russian hacking group Qilin through its pathology services provider Synnovis, something which NHS London is still coping with the costly aftermath. More than 10,000 NHS appointments have been cancelled as a consequence of the cyber attack.
Yesterday, Lloyds Bank, Virgin Money and Nationwide reported their apps suffered an outage due to problems at Microsoft. Banks NatWest, HSBC and TSB all reported similar problems with their apps last week.
Global software giants Microsoft have reported an increase in distributed denial-of-service – DDoS – attacks, where hackers overload a system by swamping it with requests causing it to crash, often with a demand for payment to end the attack.
The full extent of any damage to TfL’s network, or its transport systems, is not yet certain.
Shashi Verma, TfL’s chief technology officer, referred to an “ongoing cyber security incident” in a statement issued this morning.
“Although we’ll need to complete our full assessment, at present, there is currently no evidence that any customer data has been compromised,” Verma said.
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Lets hope TFL are as good as their word. Hard to believe that some major cities like Berlin can still operate on an old fashioned ticket system without the need for the major security risk of a sophisticated wireless electronic system.