Anonymous Goes After BART, not Simpson
posted Sunday Aug 14, 2011 by Nicholas DiMeo
Today, Anonymous has started a cyber attack against the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), after the company shut down cell phone service in downtown San Francisco to prevent a protest in the area on Friday. So far, they have taken user information, phone numbers and addresses from the website and have replaced the home page with their own version.
2,001 names of people along with passwords have also been taken from users that have used the service called myBART, which gives riders discounts and info on events and contests.
We have more on this after the break.
Anonymous, in their mission statement from #OpBART, have posted the following:
We are Anonymous, we are your citizens, we are the people, we do not tolerate oppression from any government agency. BART has proved multiple times that they have no problem exploiting and abusing the people.
Any 8-year-old with an internet connection could have done what we did to find it. On top of that, none of the info, including the passwords, was encrypted.
BART has acknowledged that their network of sites have been under attack, however they did point out that the attacks are not on the system that operates their transit network.
We're disappointed to announce that the BART website may be subject to an online attack today. This action will directly affect those customers who depend on our site, as well as the developers who use BART's open data services to serve BART customers.
Anonymous has scheduled another protest for tomorrow, the 15th of August, in downtown San Francisco during evening rush hour and at the time of this writing, executives have not decided against turning off cell service once more.
The reason for the initial protest that never came to fruition was over the police officer's shooting of a man with a knife on July 3rd. Protesters who actually attended were unable to communicate because of the cell service shutdown and the idea fizzled out.
We will keep you posted on the outcome of tomorrow's planned protest and if any charges or arrests will be made.
