It was probably a messy day for Moscow as some alleged hackers had reportedly hacked the in-built system of Russia’s largest taxi service, Yandex, in the west of downtown. These unidentified hackers have called every cab of Yandex in this area, and in the blink of an eye, the entire downtown has become a mess. This eventually caused a lot of delays in the normal traffic due to the congestion on the roads. The delay duration lasted from 40 minutes to two hours, as reported by the Russian media. However, the video of this bizarre incident has also been shared on the internet, and netizens went wild about the vulnerability of the system. You can watch the video embedded below:
In this video, you can clearly see how worrisome the situation became as a group of taxis were waiting there for “fake passengers” who called them at downtown. However, as per the official statements of Yandex to Russian media, it was declared that this is something more than just a glitch. Yandex reported that their entire system was being hacked and they are still unable to locate the hackers. However, to be on the safe side, Yandex has announced that it is going to make considerable changes to its algorithms so that, in the future, no one can intervene in its system.
Yandex will reportedly be making changes in the algorithm related to “managing hailed cabs”. Similarly, all the drivers who came here to pick up their fake passengers have also incurred a great deal of loss, which Yandex will try to compensate for them, it was stated in the report. This is surely a very strange incident, but it makes one thing clear; in order to prevent the system from being hacked, you need to continuously monitor your applications and constantly implement their security check-up as well. Such things are not meant to be taken lightly, as the loss incurred from them could be much more.
Not to mention, a similar kind of incident also happened in San Francisco this year when the self-driving Cruise taxis manufactured by General Motors got jammed at one of the intersections in the city. However, after a lot of wait, the employees of the company came and took them back by driving manually. Hence, in this case, it was the faulty software instead of the hackers, but the situation was somewhat similar.