CCTV Network of Washington DC was hit by a cyber attack in the mid-January this year. As per our sources, the surveillance storage devices which record and store all the video evidence streamlined from the public CCTV cameras and managed by the law enforcement forces was hit by ransomware.
DC city’s tech department confirmed this news and added few more facts to it. Archana Vemulapalli, the Chief Technology Officer of Washington DC Police Department confirmed the cyber attack reports and stated that the cameras operating across the city could not record any evidence between Jan 12th,2017 and January 15th,2017 due to the said digital attack.
Mrs. Vemulapalli added that an investigation into who was behind the hack is still going on. She denied the involvement of any state-sponsored actors in this hack and added that it might be just an activity of some mischief creators or tech geeks.
The good news is that security professionals have cleaned up the storage devices and removed the malicious software without paying any ransom to the hackers. The only negative instance in this whole cyber attack is that the cameras failed to record video evidence for two full days.
As per the details available to our Cyber Security Insiders correspondent, the cyber attack infected the video recording devices which were recording evidence from 123 security cameras out of the total of 187. As a result of this ransomware attack, law enforcement officials could not record video evidence from 4:00 am January 12th, 2017 to 23:16 Pm on January 15th,2017.
Note- All cameras recording evidence were on a public network. Means, the cameras were installed and owned by Government and not by any private entity.
What’s amazing in this whole hacking act is that the public CCTV network was taken down just few days before the new US President Donald Trump took his office on an an official note on January 20th,2017.
More details are awaited!
