Two Romanians Charged With Hacking Washington DC Police Surveillance Cameras Days Before Trump's Inauguration (bbc.com)

US prosecutors have charged two Romanians with hacking Washington DC police computers linked to surveillance cameras just days before President Donald Trump's inauguration. From a report on BBC: The pair are being held in Romania, having been arrested at Bucharest Otopeni airport on 15 December. Mihai Alexandru Isvanca, 25, and Eveline Cismaru, 28, allegedly accessed 123 outdoor surveillance cameras as part of a suspected ransomware scheme. Mr Trump was sworn in on 20 January. The US Department of Justice said the case was "of the highest priority" because of the security surrounding the presidential inauguration. The perpetrators intended to use the camera computers to send ransomware to more than 179,600 email addresses and extort money from victims, the justice department said in a statement.

Comments

Vindication!!

[OzPeter]

They hacked the cameras to show that the number of people in the crowd was much less than the great number who actually attended!

Re:How dumb do you have to be to do this?

[war4peace]

You forgot the women, mate.
And the tsuica. (diacritics won't work)
And the freedom. Believe it or not, Romania offers more freedom to the Average Joe than the USA does.

Re:Heroes.

[thedavidcathey]

From the article, it looks like it didn't have any impact on the cameras or inauguration security. It was just infected with a mail-bot that sent ransomware spam, much like thousands of other computers. Although, even the article is written poorly. One part says it's "computers linked to surveillance cameras" and another part says "accessed 123 outdoor surveillance cameras". The first one is probably correct - they got their ransomware mailbot installed on some Windows computers used to access the cameras, and it was sending out ransomware. The fact that they were used to access cameras isn't relevant. However, I think the fact that these are police computers, and police were likely doing other things on them (browsing, email) that got them infected, probably is relevant.

Re:How dumb do you have to be to do this?

[ls671]

They might not have realized that they were outdoor cameras in Washington DC, especially if they were building a botnet as suggested in TFS. Those cameras might just have been part of a much larger botnet.