Free parking in Russia after Distributed Denial-of-Service attack knocks city’s parking system offline

INDUSTRY NEWS 2 min read Free parking in Russia after Distributed Denial-of-Service attack knocks city's parking system offline Graham CLULEY March 16, 2026 Promo Protect all your devices, without slowing them down. Free 30-day trial Drivers in the Russian city of Perm have been enjoying an unexpected bonus this week: free parking. Not because the city council suddenly decided to embrace generosity - but rather because hackers succeeded in knocking the city's payment system offline. According to a Telegram post by local authorities, a "large-scale cyberattack" hit Perm's automated parking system, overwhelming the systems used to process parking payments. In its post officials blamed the shutdown of the permparking.ru portal and other associated payment systems on a "massive DDoS attack." As a consequence, drivers were told that they would not be held responsible for non-payment between 10-13 March, and that paid parking zones would remain free as normal over the weekend. In other words, if you parked your car during the outage you would be forgiven for non-payment as the meters were not functioning properly due to the cyber attack. Officials said that they had a team working on resolving the issue, and they hoped that systems would be back up and running as normal by today - Monday 16 March. DDoS attacks like that suspected of breaking the parking payment systems in Perm work by flooding online services with vast amounts of traffic, often using a botnet of compromised computers of devices. In this way, systems can be overwhelmed and unable to process legitimate requests - such as, in this case, parking payments. This certainly is not the first time that "smart" parking meters have attracted the attention of cybercriminals. For instance, back in 2009, security researchers demonstrated a way to meddle with San Francisco's smart parking meters - finding ways that could allow them to easily obtain unlimited parking, or reduce the time on someone else's parking meter so they might be towed away. Meanwhile, in 2015, a study of Android parking apps found a number of vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to steal drivers' passwords and payment card details. More recently, warnings have been issued by police forces about the risk that fraudulent QR codes stuck on the side of parking meters might trick drivers into visiting a fraudulent website and handing over their financial information to cybercriminals. TAGS industry news AUTHOR Graham CLULEY Graham Cluley is an award-winning security blogger, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s. View all posts RIGHT NOW TOP POSTS SCAM HOW TO Scammer phone number lookup. How to check if a phone number is a scam April 19, 2024 FAMILY SAFETY How to Outsmart AI Voice Scammers Pretending to Be Your Family March 03, 2026 SCAM DIGITAL PRIVACY HOW TO How scammers gain access and hack your WhatsApp account and what you can do to protect yourself May 01, 2024 INDUSTRY NEWS 200,000 naked Snapchat images leaked, after third-party hack October 13, 2014 FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE INDUSTRY NEWS Free parking in Russia after Distributed Denial-of-Service attack knocks city's parking system offline Graham CLULEY March 16, 2026 2 min read INDUSTRY NEWS FBI Warns Gamers About Malware Hidden in Indie Steam Games Silviu STAHIE March 16, 2026 3 min read INDUSTRY NEWS DIGITAL PRIVACY Meta to halt Instagram end-to-end encryption for DMs on May 8, 2026 Vlad CONSTANTINESCU March 16, 2026 2 min read BOOKMARKS You have no bookmarks yet. Tap to read it later.