SF Municipal Railway Hacked, Passengers Given Free Ride

The recent trend for hackers has been on the up and up, with many groups openly challenging authority figures such as the Democratic Party during the election and tech giants through their social media accounts. A recent incident showed how hacking can also have a positive effect, at least for the public, when the San Francisco Municipal Railway system was hacked and resulted in free rides for passengers

The hack apparently occurred last Friday, the San Francisco Examiner reports, which resulted in free rides for everyone for the whole day of Saturday as a means of protecting passengers. The system reflected “Out of Service” signs for the ticketing services as well as “Metro Free” signs that were put up by the staff at the time due to the effects of the hack.

Authorities declined to actually confirm that a hack had taken place on Saturday, with Muni spokesman Paul Rose simply saying that they are hard at work to fix the problem. Well, it’s really more of a problem for them since the passengers would be more than happy to keep taking advantage of the free ride that the hack afforded them.

With regards to the reason why the agency decided to open up the fare gates, it simply said that it was to minimize any impact that the incident would have on the passengers. However, there have been no details with regards to the actual repercussions that the passengers themselves would experience due to the hack, except for the inconvenience of not being able to ride the transit had the agency decided to shut it down.

It would also seem that the email system of the agency got hit by the hack, Recode reports. Not only did this result in communication problems for the network, it also caused employees to feel a sense of panic that their paychecks might not come in for the week.