Sinclair Broadcast Group Stations Hit By Ransomware Attack

Sinclair Broadcast Group, the owning company of ROH, was disrupted earlier this month by a massive ransomware attack. As initially reported by The Record, the media company suffered a nationwide outage during the ransomware attack that hit them on October 16th.

According to a report published by Vice on Friday, stations remained in disarray at that time. One staffer said that “it’s pandemonium and chaos” within the company and as of that point, some stations were still not airing commercials. The attacks went after SBG’s corporate servers. Staffers also said that management was not being forthcoming about the issue and that Sinclair hadn’t at the time told employees if the company’s payment portal or their own personal information were breached.

Sinclair issued a statement to The Wrap in a report published today which read:

“Sinclair Broadcast Group continues to work diligently to restore the business operations that were disrupted by the recent cybersecurity incident. We are bringing the systems involved back online quickly and securely, and in a way that prioritizes critical business operations. All of our stations and Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) are currently on the air and broadcasting. While we are still working to return to our complete regular programming schedule and to resolve all programming issues that may arise, network and major sports programming has aired as scheduled, a large portion of other programming has and is airing as scheduled, and all our news stations are providing news programming to our viewers. Our teams are continuing to work around the clock to address this situation, and we appreciate our colleagues’ and viewers’ patience and support.”

As Fightful notes, Maria Kanellis – who is a producer in ROH – made mention of the attacks while appearing on Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast, saying:

“Sinclair has a big cyber attack on all…ransomware like craziness. I’ve had to shoot a lot of random stuff just incase we don’t get our footage back. Sinclair has a ton of news networks, so this news network in Detroit, I think it was Detroit, had to do a drawing of what the weather was going to be and they showed it on air. They don’t have any graphics so that’s what they had to do.”

It is not yet clear if ROH did lose any footage in the attack.