Pierluigi Paganini November 22, 2015

Police body cameras sold by Martel Electronics have been found to be infected with the notorious Conficker worm.

Security experts at iPower Technologies while analyzing the body cam designed for police departments manufactured by Martel Electronics, discovered that the cameras were infected.

Martel Electronics is US company that design video systems used by law enforcement, including in-car and body cameras. iPower Technologies is working on developing a cloud-based system for law enforcement to store and manage video acquired by their cameras.

iPower discovered that the camera used for testing were infected with a variant of Conficker (aka Downup, Downadup and Kido). The malware is not complex and is actually detected by almost every antivirus software.

The cameras had been shipped with the worm, once the devices were connected to a computer, the malicious code attempted to contact the C&C server and infect other devices on the same network.

“During testing and evaluation of the Martel Electronics product, Jarrett Pavao and Charles Auchinleck, discovered that multiple body cameras had been shipped to iPower preloaded with the Win32/Conficker.B!inf worm virus. When the camera was connected to a computer, iPower’s antivirus software immediately caught the virus and quarantined it.  However, if the computer did not have antivirus actively protecting the computer it would automatically run and start propagating itself through the network and internet.” states iPower in a blog post.

iPower attempted to report the issue to Martel before publicly disclose it, but it hasn’t received a response.

Conficker is a well-known threat, it was first detected in November 2008, when it has infected millions of computers across the world. Conficker is considered by security experts one of the largest botnets ever seen. Cyber security experts linked the threat also to Stuxnet, in fact, the worm was used to open back doors into computers in Iran, then infect them with Stuxnet … “Conficker was a door kicker,”

In 2009, Microsoft alongside security firms, academic researchers and domain registries teamed up to create the Conficker Working Group, a joint effort aiming to disrupt the botnet.

Unfortunately the threat is still active worldwide.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Conficker, Police Body Cameras)