The Weather Channel is blaming a “malicious software” attack for knocking its live morning broadcast off the air for approximately one hour and 39 minutes.
“We experienced issued with this morning’s live broadcast following a malicious software attack on the network,” reads a tweet issued by the network earlier today. “We were able to restore live programming quickly through backup mechanisms. Federal law enforcement is actively investigating the issue.”
According to CNN, the attack prevented morning show “AMHQ” from airing at 6 a.m. ET. In response, The Weather Channel played taped programming until 7:39, at which point the network aired a commercial break before cutting back to the show’s anchors about four minutes later.
“The quick recovery to a malware attack at The Weather Channel is attributed to restoring programming from back-up systems. This highlights the importance of disaster recovery and backup as part of an organization’s risk management strategy,” said Mike Banic, vice president of marketing at Vectra. “We also saw the importance of offline backups during ransomware attacks to enable organizations to rapidly recover operations and avoid paying the ransom.”
“The latest cyber incident impacting the Weather Channel is another reminder that critical systems can be disrupted and incident response is crucial for organizations to quickly recover,” said Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic. “It will be interesting to see if this attack is related to the most recent string of malicious malware impacting other global organizations such as the LockerGoga [ransomware] that impacted Norsk Hydro several weeks ago.”
The Weather Channel is owned by The Weather Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Entertainment Studios.