Hacking suspects arrested in London over attack that paralyzed D.C. security cameras: Report

Police in London have arrested two individuals suspected of waging a cyberattack last month that briefly crippled Washington, D.C.’s surveillance-camera system on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration, British media reported this week.

A British man and Swedish woman, both 50, were arrested in a south London neighborhood on the evening of January 19, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency told reporters this week.

U.K. authorities declined to identify the individuals by name or state the reason for their arrests, but local media outlets said the two were taken into custody in connection with an attack that caused the majority of Washington, D.C.’s surveillance system to malfunction several days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Officials in D.C. acknowledged last week that 123 of the 187 digital video recorders connected to D.C.’s network of surveillance cameras had become infected with ransomware, a type of malicious software that typically renders compromised devices inoperable until the victim either pays a ransom to the perpetrator or obtains sufficient technical advice to neutralize the attack.

Authorities didn’t pay the ransom, and instead purged the malware by conducting a city-wide reinstallation effort the week before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Archana Vemulapalli, D.C.’s city’s chief technology officer, previously told the Washington Post. In the interim, however, authorities were stripped of their ability to access footage that would have otherwise been recorded by its network of cameras.

Public safety was never jeopardized by the cyberattack, Secret Service spokesman Brian Ebert told the Washington Post last week. Nonetheless, subsequent reporting revealed the infection prevented one of the city’s video recorders from capturing the murder of a 68-year-old disabled woman in southeast D.C. last month. Police said Vivian Marrow was shot in the head in broad daylight on Jan. 16 within sight of one of the cameras, but the ransomware infection prevented the video recorder from capturing the crime.

The individuals apprehended in London last month are free on bail through April 2017, the NCA said.