Yesterday, a false news article appeared on the website of the municipal enterprise Rēzeknes Satiksme about the launch of bus routes to Minsk, Vitebsk, Pskov, Smolensk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. What hackers were at play and for what purpose is now being investigated by the police.
Unidentified individuals who hacked the Rēzekne bus company's website were well-prepared. They not only posted a fake news article about new "social routes" being launched from Rēzekne to Belarus (Minsk and Vitebsk) and Russia (Pskov, Smolensk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg). To mislead readers as much as possible, they also imitated a "city council decision" that supplemented the fake news: complete with a date and number.
However, no city council meeting was held on the specified date, and the number was fabricated.
By the time everything became clear, the residents of Rēzekne had already read with astonishment about the new routes, the "social tariffs," and that "additional information about the schedule and advance ticket sales would follow in the coming days."
Of course, when this was discovered by the Rēzekne city council, they immediately denied everything and promised to promptly inform law enforcement so they could find the authors of the fake news and determine their motives.
The municipality also urged residents not to fall for provocations, to verify information sources, and to trust only official announcements. This suggestion sounds strange, as residents found the message about the new routes not just anywhere, but specifically on a verified and official information source — the Rēzeknes Satiksme website.
The municipality would have been better off urging their programmers, whose responsibility is to ensure the IT security of municipal information resources, to "verify" things. Because at the moment, it is nonexistent.
Currently, the Rēzeknes Satiksme website is completely down. In fact, the residents of Rēzekne have been without it for two days. Either the fake news was crafted so well that it cannot be dismantled, or law enforcement is now searching for "digital traces" of the perpetrators.
All of this happened against the backdrop of the genuine news that Latvia intends to ban all passenger bus routes to the Russian Federation and Belarus. Such amendments are currently being promoted to the rules on international passenger transport by the Ministry of Transport. According to them, the Road Transport Administration will revoke already issued permits for carriers to stop all routes to the east. The Ministry of Transport emphasizes that this restriction is in accordance with the constitution and is justified in a democratic society.
