Attackers manage to place a flood of taxi orders to the same Moscow address. This creates a significant traffic jam.
Unknown persons flooded the taxi service of the company Yandex with orders and caused a major traffic jam in Moscow. On Thursday morning (September 1), numerous taxis operated by the Yandex Taxi call service were backed up on Kutuzowski Avenue in the western district of Fili. Apparently, dozens of drivers had received a call to an address there – and then quickly got no further. After about 40 minutes, the traffic jam is said to have gradually cleared up. This is reported by the Russian online edition of Forbes.
Algorithm does not recognize flood of orders
Apparently, shortly beforehand, one or more cyber attackers had managed to place mass orders with the service and order all available vehicles to the same address; presumably they did this via the Yandex.Go app (the service is publicly available under this name). A short video on Twitter should show the traffic jam. After a while, the company’s security department stopped the wave of inquiries and the traffic jam cleared. Yandex.Go’s press office said the situation was under control and taxis would resume doing business. The algorithm for detecting and preventing such fake taxi calls has already been “improved” and will prevent such attacks in the future, the press office said.
The company did not provide any details of the attack or possible originators – not even why the existing algorithm that is supposed to prevent it did not work. Yandex Taxi also wants to consider the extent to which the affected taxi drivers could be compensated, reports Forbes (in Russian).
Yandex Taxi service is a joint venture between Yandex and former rival Uber. However, the latter gave up its presence in the Russian market in 2017 and has been working with the former local rival ever since. The IT group Yandex is best known for its search engine of the same name, which is aimed specifically at Russian-speaking users.
