The hacker is asking for money to remove the hack

Nov 28, 2016 08:55 GMT  ·  By

​The San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI) was hacked on Friday afternoon to provide free rides to all passengers, with the gates remaining open until late Saturday.

Although the hacker who managed to compromise the system hasn’t disclosed his name, he left a message to ask for a ransom should the San Francisco authorities want the service to be restored.

The screens at MUNI stations displayed a message reading “You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted. Contact For Key([email protected])ID:681 ,Enter,” while machines were printing tickets with short messages such as “Out of Service” and “Metro Free.”

After contacting the hacker, San Francisco Examiner confirmed that he was looking for a deal with the MUNI in order to restore the metro services.

“We don't attention to interview and propagate news ! our software working completely automatically and we don't have targeted attack to anywhere ! SFMTA network was Very Open and 2000 Server/PC infected by software ! so we are waiting for contact any responsible person in SFMTA but i think they don't want deal ! so we close this email tomorrow!” the hacker was quoted as saying.

No data stolen, the service not impacted

On the other hand, MUNI says the transportation service wasn’t impacted in any way and that the gates were intentionally open “to minimize customer impact.”

“Because this is an ongoing investigation it would not be appropriate to provide additional details at this point,” MUNI spokesperson Paul Rose was quoted as saying.

The conversation between the aforementioned source and the attacker continued and, in another email, the hacker who calls himself “Andy Saolis” demanded 100 Bitcoin ($73,000) to remove the malware.

“Our software try to infect anything available and SFMTA station was leak point !” Saoils wrote. “Maybe they need learning something in hard-way!”

At the moment, only part of the payment systems and station agency computers are working, as the engineers at MUNI are still trying to cope with the attack and remove the malware.

This is what the ticket systems looked like during the weeked
This is what the ticket systems looked like during the weeked

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The hack provided free rides to everyone
This is what the ticket systems looked like during the weeked
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