On February 8, pop TV, the most popular TV channel in Slovenia, a country in central Europe, was the victim of a cyber attack that disrupted business. The incident is classified as a criminal act committed for the purpose of blackmail.
The attack occurred last Tuesday and affected the TV station’s computer network, causing the daily news program “24ur evening edition” on pop TV to be interrupted.
Pop TV said in a statement on the same day that because of the cyber attack, the evening news broadcast will be canceled, but users can watch the program online or on TV playback.
Although the news broadcast resumed the next day, the attack also disrupted pop TV’s other network operations.
The following day, pop TV issued a second statement, claiming that the attack had also affected some web servers, including voyo, a streaming media platform that offers on-demand access to parent company channels, authorized movies, and TV dramas.
According to the company, the attack made it impossible for employees to add new content to the platform and normally broadcast any channel or sports event, such as the Beijing Winter Olympics. Many paying customers were irritated because they had missed the game by accident.
24UR spokesperson did not respond to our follow-up questions about the nature of the incident, but the Slovenian local news outlet zurnal24 reported that pop TV was once again blackmailed by foreign hackers. This appears to be a blackmail software attack from this vantage point.
Slovenia’s computer emergency response team (si-cert) also issued a statement confirming that it was working with pop TV to deal with the attack, but no other details were provided.
Many major television stations around the world have been infiltrated by cyber attacks in recent years, including:
- M6, France (October 2019)
- The Weather Channel,US (April 2019)
- Dawn TV,Pakistan (August 2020)
- Nine Network, Australia (March 2021)
- Cox Media Group,US (June 2021)
- Sinclair Broadcast Group,US (October 2021)
- SIC, Portugal(January 2022)
- IRIB, Iran(February 2022)
Aside from the Iran IRIB incident, the majority of the above are blackmail software attacks. The attacker’s usual tactic is to attack the TV station’s back-end IT infrastructure and disrupt program broadcasting.
However, in previous cases, engineers were frequently able to restart the system within a few hours. From this vantage point, pop TV’s risk resistance appears to be inferior to that of previous victims’ “predecessors.”
With the ongoing advancement of information technology, there has been a surge in the creation of network environments and the dissemination of data information all over the world in recent years. Cloud computing, cyber security, disaster recovery have all become hot topics as computer storage information has grown. The most valuable asset of a business is information, which is stored in the computer as data. It is necessary to protect computer-based information to ensure the continued operation and success of enterprise businesses. Almost every network in some countries will be equipped with special external storage devices, and these devices have indeed played a role in turning the world around in many catastrophic data loss accidents.