The ticketing system has been offline since last week while an investigation is being conducted, but Northern Trains said that these are the only machines affected.
The operator installed more than 600 new ticket machines across the network earlier this year as part of a £17m scheme to provide passengers with modern touch-screen machines at over 400 stations across the north of England. The servers that operate these ticket machines have now been impacted by the suspected cyber attack.
“This is the subject of an ongoing investigation with our supplier, but indications are that the ticket machine service has been subject to a ransomware cyber attack,” Northern said. It added that no customer or payment data had been compromised and that customers could still buy train tickets online.
Flowbird Transport Intelligence, the supplier of the ticket machines, said it had identified the cyber attack through its monitoring systems. “We immediately instigated our...