Conficker is back – and it's infecting police body cams

Malware spotted on law enforcement recording gear

A US IT security company says it found copies of the Conficker malware infecting police body cameras.

Florida-based iPower reports that body cameras it received from supplier Martel Electronics were loaded with 2009's baddest botware.

Researchers Jarrett Pavao and Charles Auchinleck found that when plugged into a PC, the Martel cameras attempted to execute the Worm:Win32/Conficker.B!inf variant.

While any PC running an even remotely up-to-date antivirus package would be able to detect the Conficker attempt, unguarded machines could still be infected. What's worse, iPower says the malware was present in the cameras before it received the units.

"In the iPower virtual lab environment, packet captures were also run on the infected PC to view the viruses' network activity using Wireshark," iPower said.

"The virus, classified as a worm virus, immediately started to attempt to spread to other machines on the iPower lab network, and also attempted several phone home calls to internet sites."

iPower says it tried to contact the california-based electronics supplier with its findings but have yet to receive any response. El Reg similarly tried to contact Martel, and though we were unable to get comment we can confirm the company's on-hold music to be relatively pleasant and inoffensive.

First discovered in late 2008, the Conficker virus made headlines in 2009 when researchers found that the malware, which at that point had already infected millions of PCs, had been set to perform an unspecified update activity on April 1, 2009.

The deadline came and went without incident, but the infection lingered on for months after, and even resurfaced in 2013 when a batch of new PCs in Germany were found to be carrying the malware. ®