Police Body Cameras Pre-Installed With Worm

Police are just one of many organisations that are using technology to help their everyday activities. One of these pieces of technology is body cameras, small devices which can record a policemen’s actions, allowing them to operate and display both their and others actions in court at a later date. With many police forces making these required pieces of technology and disciplining officers who turn them off it is a serious issue when these devices are exploited or misused. So what happens when they are installed with viruses?

Martel Body Cameras are supplied with GPS and are sold and marketed for use by official police departments. It would seem though that users who plug in these devices get more than they bargained for when iPower Technologies began testing the devices.

iPower Technologies are a network integrator looking at creating a cloud-based system for storing police and government videos, so during the course of their testing of products they quickly discovered something shocking. The Martel body camera came pre-installed with Win32/Conflicker.B!inf virus, a worm.

The worm in question, once unleashed, automatically spreads across the network and the internet attempting to spread it to other systems, a serious impact if the systems are meant to be secure, as government agencies expect of theirs. iPower have since contacted Martel but are yet to receive an official acknowledgement of the problem, as such they have released the information regarding this matter in a blog post. They state that the reason they have released the information is due to the severity of the security implications that these devices pose with their presence within government and police forces around the US.

Below you can find the video iPower posted showing that their anti-virus does in fact pick up and contain this worm.