18 and 19 years old. Those are the ages of the two young boys who brought public transport across all of London to a standstill in 2024. The two were eventually identified and charged, but that doesn't change the fact that worldwide, hackers are getting younger and younger. And even at a young age, they are surprisingly inventive and adept at using all the obvious hacking tools.
From an attic room in London, two teenagers thus managed to completely paralyze the metropolis of London, with its 9 million inhabitants, in terms of public transport usage. The two guys (Thalba Jubair and Owen Flowers) are said to be linked to the hacker group Scattered Spider. Ultimately, the damage for the umbrella organization Transport for London, responsible for public transport in the English capital, ran into several millions.
Thanks to an ingenious and hard-to-crack system, the two managed to shut down a large part of the security cameras and the booking system. The Citymapper app — used to plan your travel route in London — was also no longer able to access the necessary maps.