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Hacker Shuts Down Copenhagen's Public City Bikes System (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the take-a-hike dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "An unidentified hacker has breached Bycyklen -- Copenhagen's city bikes network -- and deleted the organization's entire database, disabling the public's access to bicycles over the weekend," reports Bleeping Computer. "The hack took place on the night between Friday, May 4, and Saturday, May 5, the organization said on its website. Bycyklen described the hack as "rather primitive," alluding it may have been carried out "by a person with a great deal of knowledge of its IT infrastructure." Almost 2,000 bikes were affected, and the company's employees have been working for days, searching for bikes docked across the city and installing a manual update to restore functionality. The company is holding a "treasure hunt," asking users to hunt down and identify non-functional bikes.

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. What's the motivation? Anonymity? by shanen · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Mindless vandalism? I'm trying to imagine what could motivate such a crime. What sort of grievance could justify attacking a system that lets people borrow bikes?

    Just wants to annoy other people? Maybe he sells cars and he felt the bikes were hurting sales? Maybe he's just a mercenary working for the car salesman? Or maybe the prick did it simply because he could.

    There are legitimate uses for anonymity. This is NOT one of them.

    --
    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  2. ZFS by darkain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now imagine if this database were to be stored on a ZFS volume with regular snapshots, and those snapshots were sent to other remote machines for backup... The entire database could have been recovered in minutes with just a few simple commands to re-mount the ZFS partition to a given snapshot, restart the database server software, and you're up and running again...

    Oh wait, that's right. I'm too old for tech nowadays. There are all these kids fresh out of college using newfangled technology that don't know two shits about information security or data integrity to even give this a thought in the first place. And thus the cycle continues where us old-hats are "over paid" and forced out of work in favor of these new younger generations of "tech wizards"!