Hackers attack train network to stop Putin moving troops from Russia to Ukraine
The hackers stopped trains in Minsk, Orsha, and Osipovichi by encrypting some systems, making it ‘impossible to buy tickets’
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Your support makes all the difference.Hackers in Belarus have claimed an attack on the country’s trains that brought them to a halt in order to stop Russia moving troops into Ukraine.
The ‘Cyber Partisans’ group said that trains had been stopped in Minsk, Orsha, and Osipovichi due to them compromising the routing system and switching devices by encrypting the data on them.
The hackers claimed that the attack was to “slow down the transfer” of troops moving from Belarus to northern Ukraine, saying that they had put the trains in “manual control” mode which would “significantly slow down the movement of trains, but will not create emergency situations.”
An ideological aversion to high-stakes situations has been expressed by other hacking groups. Anonymous, which has claimed a number of attacks on Russia’s banks and services, the websites of the President of the Russian Federation and Russia’s Ministry of Defence, has said that critical infrastructure is a “no-go” due to the risk of exacerbating the already tumultuous situation in eastern Europe.
Sergei Voitehowich, a former employee of Belarus’s state-owned Belarus Railway company, said that the Cyber Partisans had damaged the train traffic control system and that while it has been restored, other systems were experiencing issues and making it “impossible to buy tickets”, according to Bloomberg.
Another former Belarus railway worker sad that the systems in Minsk and Orsha had been “paralyzed.”
The Belarusian Railway did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent before time of publication.
Yesterday, the hacking group Anonymous renamed Russian president’s Vladimir Putin’s yacht to “FCKPTN” by vandalising maritime tracking data.
“Putin, who is using hacker squads and troll armies against Western democracies, is getting a sip of his own bitter medicine”, they wrote in a blog post.
Peace talks between Ukraine and Russia have started at the Belarusian border, officials have confirmed, but the death count still grows.
In the city of Kharkiv this morning, dozens of Ukrainians were killed by rocket strikes from Russian forces.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said 16 Ukrainian children have been killed and another 45 have been injured in the Russian invasion. He added that over 4,500 Russian troops have been killed.
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