Eight days prior to President Trump’s inauguration, the Washington DC Police Department had to take their cameras offline from January 12 to 15. This is the result from a ransomware attack that plagued 123 of the 187 network video recorders that are used all across the DC area. After the system was rebooted the ransomware had been eliminated. This goes to show that ransomware attacks are increasing, not necessarily to gain access to the DC police’s network, but to extort money from them.
Article – https://www.bitdefender.com/box/blog/iot-news/70-washington-dcs-cctv-cameras-infected-ransomware
Thanks for posting the Article Ioannis,
I found it a little strange that they were able to get of the ransomware by simply rebooting the system. I thought that ransomware was more persistent Do you know what variants were used in this attack? I tried to search for it but couldn’t’ find anything.
It think that for security reasons they don’t want to say anything about what the hackers did as of yet since they are probably now working on bettery security. Ransomware can be persistent but sometimes it can be poorly designed. Mal-malware if you will. I did find a source saying the removed the CCTV software and reinstalled it, which was probably easy since cameras don’t need to worry about saving data.
http://www.darkreading.com/ransomware-attack-on-cctv-cameras-in-washington-dc-ahead-of-trump-inauguration/d/d-id/1328016