So. Sinclair was hit with a Ransomware attack.
Sinclair Workers Say TV Channels Are in ‘Pandemonium’ After Ransomware Attack
Sinclair is still struggling to go back to normal operations. Channels can’t air ads, employees had no email access for days, and there’s a lot of confusion.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
22.10.21
In the early hours of Sunday morning, hackers took down the corporate servers and systems of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a giant U.S. TV conglomerate that owns or operates more than 600 channels across the country.
Days later, inside the company, “it's pandemonium and chaos,” as one current employee, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Motherboard.
Sinclair calls itself “the largest and most diversified television broadcasting company in the country,” but it has a controversial reputation. In the last few years, the company has aggressively tried to expand its already vast empire with an attempted—and failed—acquisition of Tribune Media. Critics have also criticized it for using so-called "must-run" segments to push local news stations around the country to run identical, conservative-leaning packages.
“There is no work right now. Nothing works.”
The company is now in the headlines for being the latest in a seemingly endless list of ransomware victims. Sinclair has released very few details about the attack since it was hacked Sunday. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the group behind the attack is the infamous Evil Corp., a ransomware gang that is believed to be based in Russia and which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury department in 2019.
The ransomware attack interfered with several channels’ broadcast programming, preventing them from airing ads or NFL games, as reported by The Record, a news site owned by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. It has also left employees confused and wondering what's going on, according to current Sinclair workers.
“Whoever did this, they either by accident or by design did a very good job,” a current employee said in a phone call, explaining that there are some channels that haven’t been able to air commercials since Sunday. “We're really running in the blind [...] you really can't do your job.”
The employee said that he was working on Sunday and was able to get two emails out to colleagues. “And one of them got it, and the other one didn’t,” they said.
Employees did not have access to their emails until Tuesday morning, according to the two employees and text messages seen by Motherboard. The office computers, however, are still locked by the company out of precaution, and Sinclair told employees not to log into their corporate VPN, which they usually used to do their jobs.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypg4w/ ... are-attack