65% of Washington DC's Outdoor Surveillance Cameras Infiltrated by Romanian Hackers (thehill.com) 85
An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Two Romanian hackers stand accused of hacking more than 100 outdoor police security cameras in the D.C. area during the days leading up to President Trump's inauguration, according to a court document obtained by CNN. According to an affidavit from Secret Service agent James Graham, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru are accused of hacking and disabling 123 out of 187 of the city's cameras between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15... Isvanca and Cismaru are also accused in the affidavit of spreading ransomware.
In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini.
In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini.
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Signed and submitted? Oh well that's proof right there. Case closed!
What's the weather like in Langley today AC? Lol
Of course. Conspiracy theorists never want to do the actual work themselves, and they will never, ever let evidence to the contrary dissuade them of their pet theories that they want to be true so very badly.
"A 757 wasn't spotted by any civilians?"
"Actually plenty of people saw it, and you can look up their affidavits."
"Signed and submitted? Lol."
Nothing would satisfy you short of rooting around in the wreckage directly after the crash, and I'm sure you'd find some bullshit excuse for how plane parts were p
Re: and even if they are.... (Score:1)
I saw it on tv that same day. They had news updates on it for the next dozen hours about how the roof was still on fire because of layered new construction overtop old construction, and continued drama over whether the defense officials would need to evacuate. You want to tell me that the tv footage was faked? Burden of proof is on you. Go conspiracy youself elsewhere.
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Oh hoh! There's that conspiracy word.
Yes, that's right. The conspiracy word. We have plenty of evidence that a plane hit the Pentagon, and you have absolutely no evidence that it did not.
The plane was hijacked. We know this as a statement of fact.
The plane was tracked heading in that direction. We also know that as a statement of fact.
For the "missile/bomb" theory, the plane would have to have disappeared... completely, without a trace. The commuters who saw the plane would have had to all have been Pentagon/Military/whatever plants, or bought
Who cares (Score:1)
Where I live, all the supermarket entries are swamped by aggressive Roma beggars who are not satisfied with my picture.
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(posting anonymously because SJW shit)
Roma people are an ethnicity which is not endemic to Romania, although many of them are of Romanian nationality.
Less than 3 decades ago, when Roma people were marginalized in Romania, the Western Europe countries jumped and gave Romania stern warnings, so Romania said "fine, they're free to do whatever they want". So they spread out to the western countries, doing the same things they had been doing in Romania (for which they were marginalized in the first place). And N
And what for? (Score:2)
It sounds like a particular model camera the city was using had an exploit. But...
Why did they bother? I can't think of what they had to gain unless they were setting up a blanket for some other activity that would be caught by those cameras. But that didn't happen but they are going to pay a pretty heavy price for it.
So was it just for the lulz? (I know that is a dated term but I can't think of a better word right now.)
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Why did they bother?
Could be practice in a real-world scenario. These cameras might not offer anything of particular value, but it might help the hackers get some experience in these kinds of things for cases where the cameras might offer much juicier information.
Either that or they're just bored hackers and hacking things is what they do. They compromise a system because it's there [wikiquote.org].
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It sounds like a particular model camera the city was using had an exploit. But...
Why did they bother? I can't think of what they had to gain unless they were setting up a blanket for some other activity that would be caught by those cameras. But that didn't happen but they are going to pay a pretty heavy price for it.
So was it just for the lulz? (I know that is a dated term but I can't think of a better word right now.)
If they catch pics of various congress people with other women / men that could be valuable. Blanket surveillance would nab lots of interesting finds for such an unethical group.
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Probably doing it for Putin so he could have his Rump puppet do his bidding and spy on Americans. Now that we are Rump-ruled, Rump is spying on us for his master Putin. That's how things be.
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Why did they bother?
Video surveillance of a wide area around the US Capitol Washington, D.C. area would likely be considered very valuable to foreign intelligence services and terrorist organizations.
It would enable the gathering of a great deal of intelligence. See who is having little 'walk & talks' with whom (possibly reconstructing what was said in some instances), track and determine patrol schedules of police and plain-clothes security service personnel, determine patterns of movement/travel for VIPs, and more.
No, th
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In other words, the "real problem" is that the wrong unethical bastards got control of the Panopticon.
The only way to make that problem go away is to take the cameras down.
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No, they had a potential goldmine.
Well if that was what they were after it was pretty stupid to allow the cameras go offline. For their goldmine to be viable they would tap the video and do as much as they could to make sure they weren't detected. Instead, they crashed the devices forcing the owners to find out what was wrong.
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Facial recognition and license plates in and out of any US secure site. Same for local city investigators, police, federal investigators, federal state task force members.
No undercover operation could remain a secret or start without been in a database.
A real time database of most US police, federal workers, investigators, informants as they go to work
Good. (Score:2, Interesting)
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I assume the DC police department is smarter than to use consumer IoT devices for spying on the public. Then again, we're talking about cops, who generally aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. (Even management).
Thankfully -- without stupid, technically ignorant cops, there would be even less freedom left on Earth.
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IoT devices are unsecure - details at 11.
Is that port 11? UDP or TCP?
Romanian fake news! (Score:4, Funny)
Ah HA!
So that's why the lamestream fake news media reported such small numbers of people at the Trump Inauguration!
There were really millions more but the Romanians erased them from the cameras.
Let the racist attacks begin ! (Score:1)
Well, in the UK the Romanians have been demonised and used as a main reason to convince people to vote for Brexit.
Now it seems that in the USA the scapegoating is in full swing and, surprise, surprise, the Romanians are targeted as well.
Probably Putin frowned at the whole bruhaha about the Russian interference in the elections, so the brave Secret Service agents need a more convenient scapegoat, prefferably one wihout the Russian military behind it.
Romulans (Score:2)
Proving that the Internet ... (Score:2)
... is "free." because you don't have to pay to use the shit attached to it.
The solution is to open them up (Score:2)
Police camera video should be viewable by the public or the cameras should be removed. The public should have exactly the same access as the police to this video.
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Police camera video should be viewable by the public or the cameras should be removed. The public should have exactly the same access as the police to this video.
Then crime might actually get solved. Or vigilante violence could solve it. I'm always amused at certain groups that go to great lengths to mark themselves. If the general population ever really wants to solve MS13 as an example just send a mob door to door. Have the gang tatoos and you get shot. It's admittedly extreme but it would fix the problem in a single day.
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Yes, let's have armed civilians wandering around taking pot shots at people they think are gangbangers. So if a few children get whacked in the cross fire or nailed by Bubba who swore they were pulling a gun on him. Of course this is not all that different from what currently goes on with the gun nuts.
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Police camera video should be viewable by the public or the cameras should be removed. The public should have exactly the same access as the police to this video.
No. I don't want everything I do in public subject to showing up on Facebook et al. I'd go along with requiring the cops to make it available for viewing at a station or other facility, but with no copying allowed, absent a court order.
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I'd go along with requiring the cops to make it available for viewing at a station or other facility, but with no copying allowed, absent a court order.
Then that should be the only access the police get.
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No. I don't want everything I do in public subject to showing up on Facebook et al.
Also, you're being naive and short-sighted here. There are going to be cameras everywhere, all the time. Every store, every house, every car. You can wish against it, but it's going to happen anyway. Automatic face recognition is going to get better and cheaper. Stuff you do in public will be knowable to the public. Don't tell yourself otherwise.
Re:The solution is to open them up (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, our basic psychology makes us easily fall for things which sound right but are wrong [wikipedia.org]. Investigators reviewing surveillance video footage have at least some training to avoid falling for the most common of those fallacies when identifying a suspect. If you throw a bunch of random untrained people from the public into that role, they'll usually end up falling for groupthink [wikipedia.org] and confirmation bias [wikipedia.org] leading them to the wrong conclusion. (Releasing the footage after the investigation is done via a court order or FOIA can still be done.)
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So you think what happened when ... is a good thing?
Spare us this ridiculous argument please.
People who are against alcohol prohibition aren't in favor of drunk drivers killing babies in car accidents, much less a specific baby being killed in a specific accident.
See "Appeal to Emotion" in the list of fallacies you linked to.
While police corruption is certainly possible and needs to be rooted out, we've given police the task of criminal investigations precisely because we can then train a handful of investigators of these fallacies and how to avoid them
Police are ordinary citizens like everyone else. They should be treated like ordinary citizens. "Police corruption" isn't the big problem. The big problem is that the police think they're a force apart from and above the people. That
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It is a category error to compare full public access to surveillance video feeds to the end of prohibition.
Perhaps, but that's not what I was doing. I was using an example to point out how this argument is ridiculous:
Because you favor [some easing of a restriction on something] you must think [some specific tragedy] "is a good thing".
Instead of this bullshit David Brinesque zero-privacy will cure the world's ills fallacy
No one claimed any cure of all ills.
(Also, who? Cultural references don't work any more. Instead of increasing understanding, they're just a distraction because 50% of the audience has no idea WTF you're talking about.)
...well-engineered security on the cameras by doing things like encrypt at the source, like on the CCD itself, and keeping the decryption keys in the hands of a third party that only makes them available in response to a warrant.
Who has the incentive to create that solution?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
Anybody who is unaware of that essay and yet thinks they are an informed commenter on the topic is not.
That's precious. Let's all sip our drinks with our pinkys extended and bemoan the benighted ignorance of the proles.
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Oh, so you are one of those guys. Completely unable to participate in an informed conversation, but so full of grievance and resentment that he's willing to make that the issue. Spare us.
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No, just having a little fun with someone pretentious.
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It's not pretentious, if you've been on Slashdot as long as your UID implies, you ought to be very well versed with David Brin and his nutty ideas. Someone brings it up as a full article almost as much as they do RMS's Right To Read.
And since when was quoting one of the leading thinkers in the topic of privacy vs no privacy pretentious anyway? Sometimes when confronted with a name or idea you haven't heard before, just look it up. What's wrong with that? It's the Internet, and it's information that is total
Re: The solution is to open them up (Score:2)
Or decent upstanding patriots could just rip the cameras off their poles and smash them with bats, thereby restoring a small degree of freedom to the area.
Oh, I know, I know. But muh private property! But muh rule of lawyers!
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Oh, I know, I know. But muh private property! But muh rule of lawyers!
Sure, you mock it, but it is someone's property, and it costs money to put up and money to replace. Of course you'll get fined. It's not like the city had a referendum and the voters said "no cameras!" and they put them up otherwise.
Re: The solution is to open them up (Score:2)
Lick those boots!
And... (Score:2)
who's gonna get convicted for not:
1. validating that they're securable, and
2. then securing them?
Whack a mole ... (Score:2)
A few Romanians arrested, but there will be plenty more to replace them as long as the manufacturers and vendors care little about security. The only way of doing that is to make the local hight street store liable - they will then stop selling you the cheapest that they can buy; so then all that you will have to worry about are state sponsored crackers who deliberately place back doors in these things.
Thanks for the reminder! (Score:1)
The entire west is ruled by one world government and the borders only exist to soothe people and stop them from a reactionary backlash against globalism.
"Hacking" (Score:2)
Does it still count as hacking if the camera comes preloaded with a telnet backdoor with login admin:123456 and publishes its IP address to several chinese dyndns servers as soon as you plug it into the internet?
yay! (Score:2)
Am I the only one who thinks this is super awesome? The surveillance state is incompatible with a free society and deeply unamerican. All failures for the Stasi are wins for the American people.
IOT (Score:2)
The "S: if for security. ;)