In a fresh reminder of exactly how exposed today’s high-tech world really is, a disgruntled ex-employee took his frustrations out on his former employer over the weekend.
Doing a pretty good job keeping his identity under wraps for the time being, the clearly-gifted IT operative managed to take out Copenhagen’s entire public bike-hire network in a malicious and carefully calculated attack.
Speaking on behalf of the Bycyklen bike-hire company, representatives stated that the high-tech bikes were rendered completely inaccessible for customers throughout the entire weekend. All 1,860 bikes made available by the company are powered by Android software, connected with a central operating system and a database of users.
The attack was confirmed by the company on Facebook during the weekend, at which time the fix was being implemented to bring at least some of the bikes back online.
“Everything was erased and our entire system went down as a result of the malicious action,” said the company on its website.
“Since the hacking, we have been working hard to solve the problem but, unfortunately, it’s not something we can fix with a snap of the fingers,”
“We have of course reported the serious case to the police. We apologize for the inconveniences this causes to our users.”
An investigation has since been launched.
The company has warned its customers to change their PINs as a precaution, despite there being no evidence so far of personal information being hijacked, or illegally accessed by the hackers.
