Two individuals who are alleged to have been involved in a plan to hack John F. Kennedy International Airport’s taxi dispatch system have been arrested, according to the US Justice Department.
The suspects, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, who both live in New York, are said to have hacked into the JFK airport dispatch system in an effort to modify it so that certain taxi drivers would be moved to the front of the line, according to the authorities.
Before being sent to a terminal in the order in which they arrived, taxis at JFK must wait in a holding lot. In this parking lot, taxis may have to wait several hours before being dispatched.
Abayev and Leyman, on the other hand, gained access to the taxi dispatch system and were able to alter the order in which taxis were dispatched, allowing some taxis to bypass the line. Each time they skipped the line, taxi drivers who were part of the scheme were billed $10.
The suspects, both matured 48, purportedly hacked the framework with the guide of programmers dwelling in Russia. The cybercrime operation began in 2019, and among the hacking attempts were bribing a person to use a flash drive to install malware on computers in the dispatch system, gaining unauthorized access to the system through a Wi-Fi attack, and stealing tablets that were connected to the dispatch system.
“I am aware that the Pentagon is under attack.” Therefore, shouldn’t we hack the taxi industry? allegedly, the suspects stated.
Despite the fact that both suspects are citizens of the United States, they communicated with the Russian hackers in Russian.
According to the indictment, the hackers enabled up to 1,000 fraudulently expedited taxi trips per day through this scheme, which ran until September 2021. Abayev and Leyman are said to have given the Russian hackers more than $100,000 of their earnings.
The suspects have each been accused of two counts of intrigue to commit PC interruption, which conveys a jail sentence of as long as 10 years.
