Would you pay a couple of bucks to skip an interminably lengthy taxi wait line on the airport? That’s primarily what Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman did, according to the DOJ, besides they targeted on taxi drivers. The two males, each from Queens, have been arrested for hacking into JFK’s taxi dispatch system with the assistance of Russian nationals. From September 2019 and September 2021, they charged drivers $10 to leap forward of JFK’s taxi queue. Typically, these automobiles are despatched out relying on their order of arrival.
“For years, the defendants’ hacking kept honest cab drivers from being able to pick up fares at JFK in the order in which they arrived,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams mentioned in an announcement. “Now, because of this Office’s teamwork with the Port Authority, these defendants are going through critical legal expenses for his or her alleged cybercrimes.”
According to the DOJ’s indictment, each males explored a wide range of methods to interrupt into JFK’s taxi dispatch system, from bribing folks to insert a malware-filled flash drive into a pc, stealing tablets and logging into the system over Wi-Fi. Abayev at one level messaged one of many Russian hackers: “I know that the Pentagon is being hacked[.]. So, can’t we hack the taxi industry[?]”
The pair used chat threads to speak with drivers, a few of whom additionally had their $10 price waived if they may recruit others. Abayev and Leyman have been charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit laptop intrusion, which carry a most 10-year sentence in jail. Their story follows a spate of Russian cyberattacks over the past ten years, together with the notorious hack on Florida’s voter databases in 2016, a decade-long malware scheme to steal hundreds of thousands, and the theft of NATO information in 2014.
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