Days before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, a pair of hackers managed to seize control of Washington surveillance cameras.
A report in The Wall Street Journal examines how the hackers, Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru, accomplished this feat and what eventually led to their capture. It paints them as a rather hapless duo.
Citing friends of the pair along with U.S. and Romanian authorities, the Journal characterizes their relationship as a “sometimes-playful, sometimes-stormy partnership” and says they made money via “identity theft, credit card fraud and ransomware attacks.”
The hackers apparently weren’t even trying to hit D.C. police cameras, but they caught a break after sending out emails containing ransomware to a list of addresses they’d bought on the dark web — one of those email addresses was connected to the district’s police department.
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump arrives for the inauguration ceremonies swearing him in as the 45th president of the United States.
(Reuters)
The Journal reports they ultimately seized control of 128 out of 186 D.C. police computers, which controlled the surveillance cameras.
Isvanca and Cismaru weren’t the sharpest of cybercriminal minds, it appears.
Isvanca reportedly ordered pizza using the same email address he used to hack the computers. The pair also used the same hacked police computer in a separate Amazon scam. After they purchased a barbecuing device, the tracking number showed up on the police computer — which helped authorities to pinpoint and raid the package’s destination.
The rest of the details can be read in full here.
