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Police Body Cameras Come With Pre-Installed Malware
An anonymous reader writes: The old Conficker worm was found on new police body cameras that were taken out of the box by security researchers from iPower Technologies. The worm is detected by almost all security vendors, but it seems that it is still being used because modern day IoT devices can't yet run security products. This allows the worm to spread, and propagate to computers when connected to an unprotected workstation. One police computer is enough to allow attackers to steal government data. The source of the infection is yet unknown. It is highly unlikely that the manufacturer would do this. Middleman involved in the shipping are probably the cause.
Now that's socially responsible.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
" but it seems that it is still being used because modern day IoT devices are built pretty crappy by amateurs that don't want to make good products."
You don't need a virus scanner on a read only OS, but you do need to have the people in charge and on the line of design and manufacture to not be complete morons.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While I'll grant the manufacturer isn't likely to DELIBERATELY infect things, my first assumption is that the manufacturer simply has terrible security and the worm made it into the master image for all their devices.
Never assume malice where stupidity is a viable explanation.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Even if they upload to desktops at the officers local squad, these computers would likely be protected.
Who wants oversight here?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why would the Middleman do that? The HEYDAR can already tap into the police networks and cameras directly.
When I read the title, I thought they meant the wearer of the camera.
So what is the IoT angle here? As far as I can tell the malware was placed on the drive of the bodycam as a file (it's the only infection vector that makes sense in this case), and that can happen to any USB drive. While I'm sure it's possible to design a worm that can infect IoT devices, this doesn't seem to be an example of one.
I've worked around alot of cops in the US. This is how it works --
They get out of high-school and go directly into the military. They serve their 20 years then go into law enforcement (police or federal/DEA). They never held any type of civilian job, and never learned how to interact or communicate with ordinary people.
They are accustomed to being some type of upper-enlisted person like a Master Sargent or Sargent Major when they get out of the military.
The only way they know how to communicate with people is by barking at them like a dog. Civilians don't react well to this method of communication, and so the conflicts ensue.
I used to work for TomTom, who have also delivered new devices preloaded with malware, and it's quite common to find infected computers in the factories. TT devices had a USB mass storage mode and that's what was being infected. Wouldn't surprise me at all if that's what was happening in this case too...
Are the cameras actually "infected" with it or do they just have copies of the install payload in their storage? I wouldn't have expected something like a small embedded camera device to actually be running Microsoft Windows. (Yes, I know there's a "Windows Embedded" and they could, I just wouldn't expect it.)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
unless you can scan and clean the OS image assume it has been prehacked
"The worm is detected by almost all security vendors, but it seems that it is still being used because modern day IoT devices can't yet run security products."
I thought Conficker worked on *Windows* OS. That can run antivirus.
"but it seems that it is still being used because modern day IoT devices can't yet run security products."
I'll allow you to say this when a worm is targeting Receivers or Fridges. Or even Raspberry PI. Not when the targeted item is running Windows.
Many years ago, I worked at a now-decommissioned nuclear power generating station in S. California. I did software development in the Health Physics dept.
One day I noticed that every few minutes, the PC of the developer behind me (we had "bull pen" cubes with 4 per bull-pen) would annoyingly beep.
I asked him what that was, and he said "I don't know, it just does that. I ignore it.
Turns out it was a virus. It was brought in by the local PC vendor, who one day went around from PC to PC, updating the Video BIOS of PCs equipped with a particular Matrox display card.
My PC didn't have that card. The other fellow's PC did...
It was eventually discovered, when somebody else didn't just ignore it...
This was outside of containment, and so it spread further than it would inside of containment. Due to the "what goes in, doesn't come out" policy, had the vendor updated PCs inside of containment, he would have had to have left the infected floppy disk inside. The infection would have been limited to containment.
We can all sleep better.... egad, what am I saying?!
"What's the purpose of the mandatory body cameras? To save lives? Ha....hardly. The purpose of the body camera is to feed data back to the NSA to train their image recognition algorithms . Thus enabling them to use the ever growing number of cameras across the USA and abroad to identify people wherever they may go."
Damn right I'm rolling my eyes and shouting. When police didn't have body cameras, you were paranoid about that, too, remember?
IoT police body camera device is running windows, really? It's powerful enough for that, but not for running a security scanner.
I think conficker is the least of their problems.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.