Photo Courtesy of JFK
According to federal prosecutors, from at least September 2019 through September 2021, Abayev and Leyman and Russian nationals residing in Russia engaged in a scheme to hack the taxi dispatch system at JFK Airport.
By Forum Staff
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and John Gay, the Inspector General of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, announced on Tuesday the unsealing of an indictment charging Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman with two counts of conspiracy to commit computer intrusions. The indictment charges that Abayev and Leyman, both 48 and Queens residents, hacked the electronic taxi dispatch system (the “Dispatch System”) at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Taxi drivers are required to wait in a holding lot at JFK before they are dispatched to pick up a fare. A computer system ensures that taxis are dispatched in the order in which they arrived. Abayev and Leyman conspired with Russian nationals to hack the Dispatch System and move certain taxis to the front of the line, in exchange for payment. Abayev and Leyman were arrested Tuesday morning in Queens.
As alleged in the indictment, from at least September 2019 through September 2021, Abayev and Leyman and Russian nationals residing in Russia engaged in a scheme to hack the dispatch system at JFK.
At all relevant times, taxi drivers who sought to pick up a fare at JFK were required to wait in a holding lot at JFK before being dispatched to a specific terminal by the dispatch system. Taxi drivers were frequently required to wait several hours in the lot before being dispatched to a terminal and were dispatched in approximately the order in which they arrived at the holding lot.
Beginning in 2019, Abayev and Leyman explored and attempted various mechanisms to access the Dispatch System, including bribing someone to insert a flash drive containing malware into computers connected to the Dispatch System, obtaining unauthorized access to the dispatch system via a Wi-Fi connection, and stealing computer tablets connected to the dispatch system. The members of the hacking scheme also sent messages to each other in which they explicitly discussed their intention to hack the dispatch system. For example, on or about Nov. 10, 2019, Abayev messaged the following to one of the Russian hackers in Russian: “I know that the Pentagon is being hacked[.]. So, can’t we hack the taxi industry[?]”
At various times between November 2019 and November 2020, Abayev and Leyman, working with others, successfully hacked the dispatch system. They used their unauthorized access to alter the dispatch system and move specific taxis to the front of the line, thereby allowing drivers of those taxis to skip other taxi drivers waiting in the line. Abayev and Leyman charged taxi drivers $10 each time they were advanced to the front of the line. Taxi drivers learned that they could skip the taxi line by paying $10 to members of the hacking scheme through word of mouth, and members of the hacking scheme offered some taxi drivers waivers of the $10 fee in exchange for recruiting other taxi drivers to pay the $10 fee to skip the taxi line. The hacking scheme also used large group chat threads in order to communicate with taxi drivers. For example, when the Hacking Scheme had access to the dispatch system for the day, a member of the hacking scheme would message the group chat threads, “Shop open.”
