BART Hackers Hatch Plan to Disrupt Evening Commute

Bay City News Service

A group of web hackers upset with BART for intentionally disrupting wireless service last week has stolen user information and plans to stage a protest at the Civic Center station in San Francisco today at 5 p.m.

About 2,400 members of the myBART.org website were notified Sunday that personal details of hundreds of users were stolen and posted online, BART officials said.

The myBART website remains down while the agency works to secure it, BART spokesman Jim Allison said. Allison said it would not resume operations until officials were confident users' data was secure.

The hacker protest group "Anonymous" took credit for the attack, which was made in response to BART's decision last Thursday to interrupt wireless cell phone service in several downtown San Francisco BART stations to prevent a disruptive protest. (Read more about the BART protests last week.)

Anonymous announced its intention to hack BART websites in a posting on its website. The shadowy hacker group said that it is already 

engaged in a phone, email and fax campaign to disrupt BART's operations.

Allison said that BART is working with federal officials to 

respond to the attacks and to prevent any future security breaches. He said that any myBART.org users that have had their information stolen should not open any unsolicited emails and immediately change any passwords that my have been shared with their myBART.org account.

Allison noted that BART's website infrastructure is not connected 

to the computer systems that run the trains themselves, and that the web attacks would not result in any service delays.

Another website not associated with BART, Californiaavoid.org, was 

also hacked. California Avoid is a state-sponsored partnership of law 

enforcement organizations to prevent drunken driving.