Warner requests information on security of Washington Metro online communications systems

On the second anniversary of the L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) sent a public letter to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), containing questions related to communications issues that hindered emergency response operations at the scene of the accident.

In 2015, persistent radio issues prevented District of Columbia-area first responders from communicating with each other during a smoke emergency at L’Enfant Plaza. The inability to effectively communicate led 84 hospitalizations and one death.

The letter specifically addressed three areas of concern — cybersecurity operations, wireless communication, and interoperability of first responder communications systems. Warner’s letter also follows reports of a ransomware cyberattack to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s computer systems, which left its IT system inoperable and possibly exposed customer account information.

“As a co-founder of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus and a staunch supporter of WMATA, I am acutely concerned about what this kind of attack may mean for transportation systems like WMATA,” Warner’s letter said. “While early reports indicate that the attack on SFMTA may have been opportunistic rather than targeted, I am concerned that WMATA may represent a particularly enticing target for more advanced threats, given its importance to the region and the number of federal agencies that rely on the system to transport their workforces each day.”

In recent years, cybersecurity attacks to the United States have steadily risen from approximately 1,000 attacks per day in 2015 to more than 4,000 per day in 2016.