Victoria Traffic Police Department has made it official yesterday that almost 55 of its speed monitoring and red light cameras were infected by WannaCry Ransomware. The malware flaw was detected last week when the cameras soon started to exhibit an unusual flaw of rebooting on their own for every 30 minutes.
The Victorian Department of Justice also disclosed the cause of the cyber attack in its latest bulletin released just a few hours ago. The bulletin said that the malware sneaked into the security camera network by the mistake of a contractor. It was added in the bulletin that the system will resume its operations as usual only when the Road Safety Camera Commissioner has finished their investigation.
Victorian Sheriff Brendan Facey after discussing with his colleagues has decided that infringement notices will not be issued to the public during that period.
A security patch has been applied to the entire CCTV systems of the department in order to prevent the virus from spreading further to the remaining 150+ cameras.
As per the details, an agency called Redflex has been given the project to operate and analyze the traffic of Victoria.
On May 12th, 2017, a hacking group called Lazarus targeted more than 300,000 PCs working across 150 countries with WannaCry ransomware. US law enforcement agencies tracked down the hackers to North Korea and confirmed that the malware infects only the PCs running on Windows 7 and Windows 2003.
According to the latest from Radio station 3AW, the virus was induced into the traffic camera network by a human who accidentally downloaded some software from an infected system and loaded it onto the server monitoring traffic discrepancies.
More details will be updated shortly!
