Renfe confirms cyberattack exposed customer names and emails in suspected AI-assisted breach
Spanish rail operator Renfe said on Friday it suffered a cyberattack that compromised customer names and email addresses; El Mundo reports a criminal group used AI in what would be the first such attack on a Spanish public company's website.
Spanish state rail operator Renfe said on Friday it had suffered a cyberattack that compromised the names and email addresses of some customers, in what Spanish media report is the first AI-assisted attack on a Spanish public company’s website.
Renfe said the “cybersecurity incident” originated in servers of rail infrastructure manager Adif that had been “previously compromised and interconnected” with its own systems. The attackers accessed “limited user information, consisting mainly of names and email addresses”, the company said, adding there was “no conclusive evidence” the data had been made public and “no evidence” of access to bank or financial details, payment methods, IDs or other sensitive information.
The company said the breach followed “several weeks” of attempted attacks that had been “detected and successfully blocked”, and that rail services were running normally.
Spanish daily El Mundo, citing sources close to the investigation, reported that a criminal organisation used “a system similar” to Anthropic’s AI to attack Adif’s website — which was unavailable on Friday evening — describing it as the first AI cyberattack on a Spanish public company’s website, with the incident lasting “several days”. El Mundo and other outlets reported the criminals seized 500GB of data, a figure the company has not confirmed. La Razon reported that sources with knowledge of the case said the “modus operandi points to a foreign group”.
A Renfe spokeswoman declined to say how many users were affected or when the breach occurred.
Sources
- Renfe statement, via Demócrata: https://www.democrata.es/en/economy/renfe-analyzes-a-cyberattack-on-adif-systems-that-exposes-private-data-but-not-ids-or-payment-methods/
- El Mundo reporting on AI-assisted attack, via thesun.my (Madrid): https://thesun.my/news/spain-train-operator-hit-by-cyberattack-user-data/
- Demócrata on Adif attack scope: https://www.democrata.es/en/economy/adif-suffers-a-sophisticated-cyberattack-with-possible-information-theft-and-access-to-suppliers/
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