News in Digest: Hacking a spoke in all our wheels

Hackers increasingly targeting transport companies

Cyber-attacks on governments and the corporate world rarely impact on the average person in the street.

But all that is beginning to change, as hackers would now appear to be targeting transport companies – arguably the very area of our lives that cause us the most stress.

Let’s hope their next goal isn’t self-driving vehicles.

City bike lockdown
During the night of May 4-5, hackers targeted Copenhagen city bike operator Bycyklen, rendering 1,660 of its 1,860 bicycles unusable.

Bycyklen, which claims no significant data was stolen from its customers, had no other choice than to search the streets for the bikes and restart them manually.

Bycyklen called the attack “primitive”, but conceded that it was carried out “by a person with a high level of knowledge of the IT structure of our system”.

Ticket sale freeze
And then over the night of May 13-14, a DDoS cyber-attack on DSB ensured it was almost impossible to purchase a rail ticket via the DSB app, website and ticket machines, and also the 7-Eleven kiosks at the stations.

Rejsekort passengers were unaffected, and DSB allowed those customers without the travel card to buy tickets from staff on the trains.

“We have all of our experts on the case,” said DSB spokesperson Aske Wieth-Knudsen.