Anonymous Hacks San Francisco Subway System Website

Anonymous Hacks San Francisco Subway System Website


After last week’s decision to shut down the mobile networks by the San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit System — BART, in short — in a bit to disrupt a planned protest, hacktivist group Anonymous made good on its promise to cause its own disruption.

The hacktivist collective hacked the mybart.org website shortly after midday on Sunday, targeting it with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack — with a twist.

As CNET reports, though the site was running slower than usual, one notable change was clear. The site had been defaced with the ominous symbol of Anonymous: the Guy Fawkes mask.

The bart.gov website, the BART system’s main portal, remains online and unaffected, however.

Along with this, the mybart.org website had also been hacked into, and a vast database of user emails, addresses and phone numbers of website users has been leaked onto code-sharing website, Pastebin.

Other websites, including the California Office of Traffic Safety’s ‘California Avoid’ site has also been defaced.

BART, in a statement, warned of potential disruption to its online services — responding directly to Anonymous’ threats — noting that the website is “wholly separate from any computer network” from the transport infrastructure itself.

Last week, a protest was planned as a result of the shooting of a man on the subway by BART police. The subway network took to shutting down cell and wireless networks to stations in a bid to block the communications of protesters.

An Anonymous press release, issued this weekend, also pointed towards a “massive Black Fax and Email Bomb” in a bid to cause disruption to BART’s communications systems; the same disruption seemingly caused to members of the transit system during the protest.

Warning of further attacks, a message on Twitter by an Anonymous account said: “We’re not done yet folks… we’re just getting warmed up”.