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 upâ€.
[zdnet]
