The news monitoring service TVEyes now joins the trail as the latest victim. Reportedly, the TV and radio broadcast search engine, TVEyes Inc., has disclosed a ransomware attack on their systems. Following the incident, the service went down.
TVEyes Struck With Ransomware
Recently, the broadcast search engine and news monitoring service TVEyes recently suffered an outage. Now, it turns out that TVEyes actually faced a ransomware attack.
On January 30, 2020, many users flooded Twitter with complaints of TVEyes outage.
.@TVEyesInc Flop fix the site
— Steve Morris (@stevemorris__) January 30, 2020
@TVEyesInc is service out today? getting a 503 error message on login page
— Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) January 30, 2020
At that time, the service only informed users about a ‘technical glitch’ that they’re trying to resolve.
Yes, TVEyes end user systems are down due to a technical issue. Our engineers are working on it right now. Please check back later for updates.
We understand how important TVEyes is to you and are working hard to restore this essential service.
— TVEyes, Inc. (@TVEyesInc) January 30, 2020
However, the problem continued eventually making the users suspicious of the outage.
Finally, on January 31, 2020, TVEyes unveiled the fact that they were actually hit by ransomware. They also clarified that they had to ‘rebuild the system’ for service restoration, for which, they did not have an ETA.
TVEyes core server & engineering workstations were targeted by a ransomware attack and caused an outage.
We are rebuilding the system & expect to have TVEyes back online soon, but do not have an exact ETA. We appreciate your patience & will provide updates as they are available.— TVEyes, Inc. (@TVEyesInc) January 31, 2020
Restoration Process Going On
Following the attack, users became concerned about the security of their data. However, according to CEO TVEyes, David Ives, the attack seemed a typical ransomware attack solely focused on making money. The CEO confirmed that the attackers did not download any data.
All the engineers have been working on this since early yesterday morning, and there’s no evidence that data was downloaded. It appears it was purely an attack to make money.
Fortunately the firm restored their servers from backups
TVEyes Inc. is an international broadcast media monitoring firm based in the United States and covers TV and radio news. The attack, despite not being so harmful (apparently), still holds significance considering its timings and the subsequent impact on the political campaigns.
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