Ransomware hits TV & radio news monitoring service TVEyes

By -

 Newsrooms, political campaigns, and PR agencies panic as they lose access to one of their crucial media monitoring tools.

A ransomware infection has brought down TVEyes, a company that manages a popular platform for monitoring TV and radio news broadcasts, broadly used by newsrooms and PR agencies across the globe.

TVEyes CEO David Ives told the ransomware attack took place after midnight on Thursday, January 30.


The ransomware hit core server & engineering workstations inside TVEyes' network, primarily in the US, but also some systems located abroad.

Ives told they have not yet identified the ransomware strain that infected the company's network, but they have already began recovery efforts.

The TVEyes CEO says they don't intend to pay the ransom demand and are currently restoring from backups and rebuilding impacted infrastructure.

In the meantime, the company's main product, the TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite (MMS), has been down for the past two days, sources at various public relations (PR) agencies have told.

The TVEyes platform tracks TV and radio broadcasts from US (national and all 210 smaller markets) and major international media outlets. MMS allows users to search past broadcasts for keywords and set up email alerts for new occurances.

It is a valuable tool for many reporters, PR personnel, and political campaigns.

Ives said there's no ETA for when the TVEyes platform will restore service, but they are working to get the service back up as soon as possible.

"These sorts of third-party service providers are prime targets for ransomware attackers who know the services are uniquely vulnerable given they have customers and clients who rely on them and trust them with their data," Paul Martini, CEO of cloud security company iboss.

"With a service like this, it's not just about preventing access to the platform, but also a question of what sort of customer data has been compromised in the attack," Martini added, echoing the fears expressed by some PR agents who notified about the outage.

Many of the platform's users are now worried that their personal and financial information might have been stolen by hackers before encrypting their files.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Hacker steals data of millions of Bulgarians, emails it to local media

By -
Image
  Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a  message posted on its website  on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior  confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total populatio
Read more

​Linux totally dominates supercomputers

By -
Image
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened:  All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the  November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the  first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc
Read more

Microsoft tries to stem its self-made collaboration-tool confusion

By -
Image
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t
Read more