Taxi dispatch system at JFK airport gets hacked

BleepingComputer reports that two individuals have been charged with hacking the taxi dispatch system at the John F. Kennedy International Airport with the help of Russian hackers. The taxi dispatch system was established to ensure fair operations among taxi drivers in the area, which sees high demand for their services. However, starting in 2019, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman made several attempts to gain unlawful access to the system, including bribing an individual to insert a malware-containing flash drive into one of the systems connected computers, stealing tablets connected to the system and breaching the system via Wi-Fi. Once they gained access, the hackers set up a service in which taxi drivers may pay $10 in cash or through mobile payment to skip the queue and pick up a fare immediately. According to spreadsheet documents recovered by law enforcement officials, the scheme allowed participating taxi drivers to perform around 2,500 trips per week. According to the indictment, the defendants paid the Russian hackers more than $100,000 as payment for software development.