HONOLULU (KHON2) -- City officials are still working to restore TheBus and TheHandi-Van websites after they went down on Saturday, June 15.
Authorities confirmed on Tuesday, June 18 that a cyber breach was the cause of the outage.
The director of the Honolulu Transportation Services Department said TheBus and TheHandi-Van service was back to normal by Saturday afternoon, but some digital connections that were cut to avoid user and system data leaks remain severed.
"Including system connections to the city system, including connections to our, our contractors that provide our HOLO service," Morton said.
The DTS said residents who use credit cards to load HOLO cards should not be concerned.
"The only traffic that we have is one-way traffic from the busses to the servers. And that was, that, that was intentionally pulled," Morton said.
Experts said isolating the breach was a critical first step.
"In any good incident response, you want to segregate the infected part of the network to the part of the network that could potentially be used to spread to other networks outside of your control," CYPAC Cybersecurity & I.T. president Attila Seress said.
Federal authorities from the FBI, TSA and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are involved in the investigation. Morton added that officials are methodically upgrading their systems and working to get them back online.
"Part of that is disinfecting hundreds of workstations on the chance that they might hold some kind of virus on them," Morton said.
I.T. professionals said the possibility is concerning.
"That they suspect that the infection could not just be localized, but spread throughout their entire organization," Seress said.
Morton said investigators are looking into exactly what kind of cyber attack occurred, though it is evident that an outside actor entered the OTS system.
"That's clear," Morton said. "Whether it was the definition of ransomware or not, that's still under investigation."
Officials said rider information is safe while experts point out it is a perfect reminder to check transactions before paying a monthly bill.
"Just because OTS may have secured your credit card data securely, it doesn't mean that the rest of the vendors that you might use, they didn't have a breach," Seress said.
HOLO card readers for TheBus and TheHandi-Van are currently offline -- officials are working to turn them back on and said riders can show their HOLO card to the operator as proof of fare in the meantime.