The Weather Channel, a pay television channel of America and a business unit of Entertainment Studios was hit by a ransomware attack yesterday which led to 90-minute downtime of live broadcasting in early hours of today. Later the anchors returned to the show and informed viewers that a malware attack on its database caused the disruption and now their systems are back to normal operations- all thanks to their backup and recovery plan.
When the AMHQ show started at 6 am in the morning Eastern Time, soon the show switched to the airing of a taped program “Heavy Rescue”. After a 90 minute period, the anchors returned to the show and said that the program was aired as a filler to cover the disruption caused by a ransomware attack on their servers.
The Weather Channel released an official statement in the afternoon yesterday saying that the law enforcement is busy investigating the case. However, it did not disclose any further details about the incident and the suspects as it was waiting for an incident to be probed thoroughly.
Soon, certain twitteratis following ‘The Weather Channel’ started to circulate the news that the servers of the channel were under the siege of Russian or Chinese intelligence and went on to the extent to say that the ransomware was spread into the network through an email phishing attack.
However, the 36-year old company which is into Media & Entertainment failed to acknowledge the news and said that they were just assumptions of their beloved channel followers.
Note- The Weather Channel is a business unit of Landmark Communications which was founded in 1982. It is basically a pay-to-subscribe television service which is reported to have 79.128 million active users across the United States. It offers services both in HD (1080i) and Standard Digital format (480i). It basically airs weather forecasts and analysis along with certain entertainment programs related to weather
