Live Streams Go Down Across Cox Radio and TV Stations in Apparent Ransomware Attack

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting at Record: Live streams for radio and TV stations owned by the Cox Media Group, one of the largest media conglomerates in the US, have gone down earlier today in what multiple sources have described as a ransomware attack. The incident took place earlier this morning and impacted live streaming capabilities for the Cox radio and TV stations. Official websites, telephone lines, and other IT systems remained running. While live streams for most of the impacted TV stations have now returned online, most of the Cox radio streams are still offline at the time of writing.

This just never ends.

[oldgraybeard]

So when is someone going to ask the right questions?

Re:

[Gruntbeetle]

Was anything of value lost?

Re:This just never ends.

[Tablizer]

Was anything of value lost?

Well, their cox fell off.

Re:

[Gravis Zero]

So when is someone going to ask the right questions?

When they have no other options left.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Because they keep ignoring the sign:

Do Not Feed The Pirates

Re:

[oldgraybeard]

What products were cracked, What was the entry point, A detailed description of what happened. We never hear any of the details about any of this. What companies products were involved? How was IT security breached? What has been changed to fix the problem? Just asking?

now they've done it

[sdinfoserv]

The Rooskies have officially pissed of a corporate oligarch. Prepare to see laws changed swiftly and have consiquences. Corporations always get what they want. Don't interfere with corporate profit.

Canâ(TM)t pay the billion dollar judgement so

[dknj]

Remember, no one is facing personal liability or criminal prosecution over their wanton piracy. Ergo all you have to do is make sure you have a complete corporate structure in place, donâ(TM)t pierce the corporate veil, and plan to be ransomwares and you, too, can pirate with impunity.

And it will keep happening

[SoftwareArtist]

As long as companies keep paying the ransoms, criminals will keep coming back for more. No one should be surprised.

Make it illegal to pay ransoms and watch how fast the attacks dry up.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

I know it is easy to say it, but doing it? The colonial pipeline attack in less than a week caused gas lines in multiple states. I'll assume they paid and that got them running again. But assume they did not, and it took a month to get the pipeline back? There would have been riots along the entire east coast. On a smaller scale, say you are a hospital, with patients literally dying without the systems online. Do you let them die? The latest meat packing incident. I believe I saw 20% of all beef is processe

Re:

[SoftwareArtist]

Yes, you let it happen. I know that's harsh, but if we'd done this sooner, those attacks wouldn't have happened in the first place. And what about the next 500 attacks that will be just as serious? Short term there's some suffering, but long term it's far better.

If it were me, I'd start with a firewall that blocks all Russian's IPs as a starter as a punitive measure.

It wouldn't work. They'd just route their attacks through a relay in another country. That kind of response would hurt millions of innocent people, but for the criminals it would barely even be an inconvenience.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

I know it is easy to say it, but doing it? The colonial pipeline attack in less than a week caused gas lines in multiple states. I'll assume they paid and that got them running again. But assume they did not, and it took a month to get the pipeline back? There would have been riots along the entire east coast.

The shortages were caused by idiots causing a run on gasoline. Just like last year, there was a run on toilet paper, meat, canned food, etc.

A week downtime is nothing. The pipeline is long, and there

Re:

[stabiesoft]

So do you live there? I have a friend in NC. It was bad. But go ahead and make light of it. People made light of the TX blackout. I lived it. It was bad.

Re:

[whoever57]

The colonial pipeline attack in less than a week caused gas lines in multiple states.

No, it didn't take the pipelines down. It took down the billing system and the greedy operators shut down the pipeline out of fear that they might not get paid.

The operators imposed a huge economic hit on the east coast so that the
C-level exec would not miss their bonus.

We Live in Interesting Times

[classiclantern]

It has been a fun day on the internet engineering blogs. Three new serious ransomware attacks this week and Microsoft has announced a new version of Windows. Microsoft is also getting into the vote tracking business. What could go wrong? An East Coast petroleum company was shut down for a week and Bill Gates announces a new nuclear power plant. Well, fun for me anyway.

Re:

[Tablizer]

To be thorough, they wildcarded their attack: "DELETE *OX". Collateral damage is not their problem.

Put your system on ROM

[fustakrakich]

There, now it's bulletproof

Re:

[gwdoiron]

Also, all the security flaws in version 1.0 can't be fixed.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, they can. Put the chip in a socket. You'll always have a working system until the smoke leaks out. If you want secure, it's can't be writable, you do that somewhere else

Impractical on any level

[gwdoiron]

True ROMS use an at-the-wafer masking process which takes many weeks, even when we aren't in the middle of a global chip shortage. This kind of thing also has large NRE costs associated with it. Who is going to bear the cost of a million dollars to spin up the fab and spit out the ROMS? In the old days, they could divide that cost among every person buying their motherboard. But what you're talking about is a customer-specific implementation. And that cost has to be paid EVERY time you change the code.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

If you want "secure", you do what you gotta do. The compromises we are under now are insufficient. Time is not important, just move in the right direction.

Re:

[gwdoiron]

Indiscriminately throwing money at a problem and hoping it goes away probably won't work on this particular problem.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

What makes this "indiscriminate"? It focuses directly on mitigating the problem in the most secure fashion possible. You cannot scramble a read only system, you put the writable parts somewhere else, a safe distance away. Well, regardless, a simple cost/benefit study will bring out the best solution to the whole thing. It might be cheaper just to let it happen and pass the costs on to the customer.