A cyberattack blocked the trains in Denmark

At the end of October, a cyber attack caused the trains to stop in Denmark, the attack hit a third-party IT service provider.

A cyber attack caused training the trains operated by DSB to stop in Denmark the last weekend, threat actors hit a third-party IT service provider.

The attack hit the Danish company Supeo which provides enterprise asset management solutions to railway companies, transportation infrastructure operators and public passenger authorities.

DSB is the largest train operating company in Denmark.

“Trains throughout the country stopped in the morning and only started running again at 1pm, while DSB expects that regional and long- distance trains will not run fully according to the timetable again tomorrow.” reported the local broadcaster DR. “DSB informs DR Nyheder that the paralysis of train traffic is due to an error in the safety-critical IT system ‘Den Digitale Rygsæk 2′”

In attack impacted the Digital Backpack 2 platform provided by Supeo, it allows train drivers to access operationally critical information using an iPhone or iPad.

It is likely that the threat actor targeted operational technology (OT) systems to disrupt operations.

Experts speculate that Supeo may have suffered a ransomware attack, the company told Reuters that the attackers are financially motivated.

“We were contacted by our subcontractor who told us that their testing environment had been compromised by criminal hackers,” DSB’s chief of security, Carsten Dam Sonderbo-Jacobsen, told public broadcaster DR.

“It hasn’t targeted infrastructure or DSB, it was economic crime,” Sonderbo-Jacobsen told Reuters.

Supeo did not comment on the incident.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Denmark)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.