Ransomware attack has made a police department in the State of Texas lose 1TB of critical CCTV evidence. As per our sources, Cockrell Hill Police Department of Texas State was cyber attacked last month which resulted in the lockdown of critical files on the security surveillance database.
And instead of paying the ransom, the police chief decided to wipe of data resulting in loss of valuable video evidence.
Stephen Barlag, the Chief of Cockrell Hill Police Department admitted that cyber crooks have taken down their department’s server which resulted in the loss of video evidence secured since 2009. The digital evidence includes body cam videos, some photos, MS Office suite Documents- Word and Excel files, some car dash cam videos and some police related files accounting to almost 2TB of data.
Stephen admitted that almost half of the data from the lost 2TB was required to prove some notorious criminals as guilty. He, however, preferred to remain silent on why his department failed to back up data.
Initially, the police department authorities blamed Russian hackers behind this data heist. But later Mr. Barlag released an official statement saying that the data hack was done by some hackers from Ukraine.
According to sources from the department who like to be anonymous, the malware was introduced into the Texas police department’s network in December’16 via a spam email that had come from a cloned email address posing as a forwarded message from the top police official. But it was a fake email ID and contained the malware which then entered the database and locked the data in early January’17.
The officials of the police department discovered the truth about the cyber-heist in the second week of this month and started a probe.
Cockrell Hill immediately reported the incident to FBI Crime unit and said that the hackers were demanding $4000 to unlock the files.
But eventually, the chief of Cockrell Hill Police Department decided not to pay Ransom and instead decided to wipe the server for reasons best known to him and his staff.
As per the departments Prima Facie which is now available to the media, the virus which locked the database of the Texas police department was named to OSIRIS ransomware.
But as per our Cyber Security Insiders technical experts, there is no such ransomware called OSIRIS existing in the cyber world.
More details are awaited and will be published as soon as they are available!
