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Drew Hinshaw in Washington and Valentina Pop in Bucharest report in the Wall Street Journal,

Eight days before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, the Secret Service received an urgent call saying hackers had seized control of most of the video surveillance cameras that keep watch over the U.S. capital.

A lead agent jumped off his treadmill and charged toward the command center where police monitored the camera feeds day and night.

Instead of streaming videos, the computer screens displayed a message in red capital letters: “YOUR DOCUMENTS, PHOTOS, DATABASES AND OTHER IMPORTANT FILES HAVE BEEN ENCRYPTED!” Anonymous hackers demanded $60,800 in bitcoin to return control of the surveillance system.

In a Bucharest apartment 5,000 miles east, Alexandru Isvanca called Eveline Cismaru to his computer. The screen showed live footage from Washington. The 20-something couple with a history of small-time scams had inadvertently hacked the world’s most powerful nation for a five-figure ransom at a time of high anxiety over national security on Inauguration Day.

The Romanians had launched hundreds of thousands of emails embedded with ransomware in an attachment disguised as an invoice, authorities said. The list of email addresses they bought included, by chance, the Washington, D.C., police department. A recipient there apparently took the bait, opening the attachment that locked up the street-camera system. Only a payment could produce the key.

Secret Service agents swarmed Washington, taking offline the many internet-connected elevators, fire alarms and thermostats along the planned presidential route to prevent further sabotage.



For years, Mr. Isvanca and Ms. Cismaru shared a sometimes-playful, sometimes-stormy partnership, supporting themselves at various times through identity-theft, credit-card fraud and ransomware attacks, according to friends, as well as U.S. and Romanian authorities.

Their latest gambit, authorities said, was the ransomware virus, which redirected the Washington video feed to their Bucharest apartment. For the couple, it seemed an unexpected stroke of good fortune.

...Within a year of their meeting, Ms. Cismaru learned to acquire and use stolen credit cards to buy items online, according to Romanian prosecutors.

The couple kept to relatively low-risk capers using black-market software, email lists and stolen credit-card numbers, small fish in an ocean of fraud.

...In the U.S., fraud involving debit- and credit-card payments in 2016 neared $7.5 billion, 60% of it from online fraud, according to the most recent surveys from the Federal Reserve.

Banks and retailers generally accept those losses, either because they don’t want to risk losing customers by refusing them refunds, or because the cost of pursuing suspects like the Romanian couple is too high. Consumers, at some point, end up paying higher prices to cover the losses.

Read more about the hackers here.