Weather channel turned off air by "malicious software attack"
We live in an age where companies suffer from data breaches and hacks of various types on a disruptive regular basis. Credit card companies, social networks and online stores are the common goals, and sometimes twenty twenties with payment information, personal information and other data they should not have access to. It happens. Now it's happened to the Weather Channel.
Early yesterday morning's channel was forced to standardize to a loss recording of one of the programs instead of the typical morning display broadcast after a "malicious software attack" made it impossible for the show to continue.
Details of the attack are small and there are many unanswered questions here, but the biggest is obvious: Who would hack the Weather Channel?
"We experienced problems with tomorrow's live broadcast after a malicious software attack on the network," Weather Channel said in a statement after yesterday's attack.
"We could quickly restore live programming through backup mechanisms. Federal law enforcement actively investigates the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience to viewers as we work to resolve the issue."
When live programming returned, anchors apologized for downtime and repeated that the cause of the problems was some kind of software attack, even though the specifics have still not been revealed.
It is also unclear whether this was a targeted attack – if one or more people specifically targeted the Weather Channel to postpone for some time with software utilization – or if their networking systems were compromised. [19659002] Ransomware and other types of malware that prevent access to certain data files and functions have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, and while developers of such nasty software love to catch big fish like a TV network, it is often sown online in a much less direct way.
A Weather Channel employee who clicks a bad link in a spam email may have been all it takes to bring the entire operation to a screaming stop. We have to wait and see if more details are released in the coming days.
