Sinclair, one of the largest broadcast television station owners in the U.S., saw widescale disruptions on Sunday due to a ransomware attack.
The Record tracked the event, which wreaked havoc with Sinclair’s internal systems and caused local television outages that impacted morning programming, local news and some NFL games in markets across the U.S., as illustrated by several tweets from viewers and Sinclair-owned stations.
According to Sinclair, on October 16 it identified and began to investigate a potential security incident, which by October 17 had disrupted certain office and operational networks were disrupted. The company said that data also was taken from its network and that it’s working to determine what information the data contained, which will determine what additional actions may be necessary.
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Sinclair said that it notified senior management, legal counsel, a cybersecurity forensic firm, law enforcement and other governmental agencies after detecting the ransomware attack and that a forensic investigation remains ongoing.
“While the company is focused on actively managing this security event, the event has caused – and may continue to cause – disruption to parts of the company’s business, including certain aspects of its provision of local advertisements by its local broadcast stations on behalf of its customers. The company is working diligently to restore operations quickly and securely,” said Sinclair in a statement. “As the company is in the early stages of its investigation and assessment of the security event, the company cannot determine at this time whether or not such event will have a material impact on its business, operations or financial results.”
According to the Record, the attack didn’t impact Sinclair’s master control system for broadcast so that company was able to bring in a national feed to replace the scheduled local broadcast programming on some of the impacted networks.