Ransomware brought down services of popular TV search engine TVEyes

TVEyes was brought down after its core server and engineering workstations were infected with a ransomware attack, company CEO confirmed.

TVEyes is a company that manages a popular platform for monitoring TV and radio news broadcasts, it is used worldwide by PR agencies and newsrooms.

On Thursday night, a ransomware attack hit the company network causing an outage of its multimedia messaging and data feed services (i.e. TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite (MMS)).

TVEyes reported the incident to its customers by email, one Tweet sent by the company to Medium Buying explained that the root cause of the outage was a ransomware infection.

“We are rebuilding the core system on fresh hardware, and expect to have TVEyes back online soon, but do not have an exact ETA for services to be restored,” the email says. “As you can imagine, TVEyes engineers are working nonstop and will continue to do so until we are back up and running.”

CEO David Ives confirmed that the company did not pay the ransom and that the internal staff restored from backups after sanitized the impacted systems.

“All the engineers have been working on this since early yesterday morning, and there’s no evidence that was downloaded,” said TVEyes CEO David Ives.

“Ives said in an interview. “It appears it was purely an attack to make money.”

At the time of writing, the company has not yet identified the ransomware family that infected its systems.

Another unknown aspect of the attack is that at the time it is not clear if the hackers have exfiltrated information from the company.

The company CEO added that the attack didn’t appear to be the result of a cyber espionage campaign aimed at stealing data on political candidates.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – TVEyes, hacking)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.