14 DAY TRIAL // Two hackers were reportedly arrested in London under the suspicion that they were behind the cyber attack that took down CCTV cameras in Washington DC ahead of President Trump’s inauguration last month.
According to the Sun, police raided a house in the south of London and arrested two people - a British man and a Swedish woman. They were detained by the National Crime Agency just hours before the inauguration of Trump on January 20, but their arrest has not been disclosed until now.
Eight days before Trump’s big day, Washington surveillance cameras were left useless after a malware made its way onto the storage devices recording data from CCTV cameras across the city. With the increased need for those cameras given the approaching inauguration, the situation was dire.
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It wasn’t just any type of malware, either, it was ransomware as the hackers tried to make a buck off the Washington DC Police. The entire situation lasted for about three days, between January 12 and January 15, during which time 123 of the 187 video recorders stopped working. The intrusion was confined to the CCTV cameras used to monitor public areas and did not go any deeper than that.
No ransom was paid, however. The devices were taken offline, all soft was removed, and the system was restarted at each site, which explains why it took so long for the system to be back to rights.
Ransomware is one of the most widespread malware types at the moment, and it’s slowly trickling to mobile devices as well. The malware affecting the computer encrypts all data and hackers tell users to pay up or have all the data disappear.
Given the size of the procession in Washington and the number of guards and armed police at the inauguration, leaving the city without CCTV cameras would have affected the way the day went since such surveillance is particularly important on days such as that.