Hackers attack Danish Railway Company DSB

Danish Railway Company DSB (Danske Statsbaner) confirmed that it suffered a large-scale DDoS attack on May 13. The incident caused the loss of approximately 15,000 customers. Buying train tickets through the company’s applications, ticket machines, websites, and stores, operators had to manually ticket, and the problem was resolved on the morning of May 14. Check out the best webinar software list from webinarcare website.

This is the second cyberattack in Denmark in May. The Public City Bikes System in Copenhagen was hacked and the database was deleted a few days ago.

The Danish railway operator DSB transports more than 195 million passengers each year. The operator is responsible for operating most of the passenger train and railway maintenance services of the Danish Railway. The DSB also operates a commuter rail system that connects the regions and suburbs within the metropolitan area around Copenhagen in the Danish capital, known as the S-tog. In addition, DSB also provides partial train services within Sweden.

Deputy director of the DSB, Aske Wieth-Knudsen expressed, DSB technicians and IT contractors after careful analysis concluded that: this is an external attack, an attempt was made to close the DSB system.

According to The Local, a Danish local media report, the attack also affected DSB’s internal mail and telephone systems, causing DSB to choose to communicate via social media.

President of DDoS solutions vendor Corero Network Security, Andrew Lloyd said that “The DDoS attack seen in Denmark this weekend on critical national infrastructure is precisely the type of attack that EU Governments are seeking to protect citizens against with last week’s introduction of the Network and Information Systems Directive (NIS).”

Ensuring the safety of control systems (such as railway signal transceiving, power lines, and rail routes) can greatly reduce the risk of endangering public safety. Attacks by malicious attackers against relatively vulnerable management systems can cause massive damage.

In October 2017, the Swedish transport agency also suffered a DDOS attack. As a result, the booking system lasted for as long as two days and the train operator was delayed.

Lloyd emphasized that transportation companies and other basic service operators must invest in improving the defense capabilities of active networks to ensure that online services are not affected.

Source: infosecurity-magazine