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Entercom Hack Affects Atlanta

R

RoddyFreeman

It's been in the trade press, but Entercom was the victim of a malware attack a few days ago.

Everything is down: email, sales systems, music selection, etc. The Atlanta stations sound normal on the air so I suppose the local people are doing a stellar job of handling things on individual computers.

I don't know when things will get back to normal, but email according to the trades might be down for another week.

I received the following message this morning in response to an email:

"We are currently experiencing technical issues with our email. Please contact our local markets via phones, or visit our web site at www.entercom.com to find our contact information."
 
Looks like the IT department at the home office has some 'splainin' to do.
Why were the computers not protected?
 
What a major headache for everyone involved. I wish they'd catch those rats one of these days. I myself have suffered from their curse already. However, I decided not to pay, but instead, bought a new computer (I needed one badly anyways).
 
frankberry said:
Looks like the IT department at the home office has some 'splainin' to do.
Why were the computers not protected?
Click to expand...

The Weather Channel, iHeart, and Urban One were also hit with ransomware in the past year or so as was the City of Atlanta. You just can't lock these systems down tight enough to stop human stupidity. People are still opening email attachments, going to gaming sites, and generally not using 21st century computer hygiene. A lot of corporations drill this into your head with "training" every six months. The company I work for sends out spoof email attachments to bait the unwashed...they catch quite a few I hear.
 
One would think they would be using an “internet server” type system where instead of directly accessing the internet, when folks at the station or office click on the icon for the internet your computer is linked to a server that actually browses the internet. It can be a little slow at times but instead of having to protect all the computers in the office, you concentrate anti malware, virus protection resources on the server. A few years ago I saw a demonstration of a software system for servers that would open up everything in a “sandbox” first before it would send it to the user. It was kind of pricy $9.999.00 plus you had to use their service $500 a month.
 
Not owned by Entercom
Click to expand...

Yup, I know that. :)

It was an attempt at inside humor.

The running gag on this forum used to be (regardless of subject) - "...but how does this affect Q100?" :)

(I replaced the Q100 reference with Rock 100.5.)
 
MarkW said:
Yup, I know that. :)

It was an attempt at inside humor.

The running gag on this forum used to be (regardless of subject) - "...but how does this affect Q100?" :)

(I replaced the Q100 reference with Rock 100.5.)
Click to expand...

Where is Caller10 when we need him to explain things? :cool:
 
Correct Me If I'm Wrong

But it was my impression that all these updates from Microsoft are supposed to prevent this. Are the victims simply not keeping up with all the updates???
 
kf4rca said:
But it was my impression that all these updates from Microsoft are supposed to prevent this. Are the victims simply not keeping up with all the updates???
Click to expand...

You literally have scores of PCs or devices that run windows (or some other kind platform) at any large market station. In a perfect world everyone would check to see if the "automatic" updates are working daily. It would be hard for an IT person to check every computer daily. That assuming you have a full time IT person on the premises. A lot of smaller companies outsource. Also if you have lap tops that leaves the station and come back who knows what the laptop could have been exposed to.
 
I wonder how many of those PC's were running W2K or XP and still running Internet Explorer instead of Chrome.
Probably not a good idea to hire an IT guy who doesn't know about https://krebsonsecurity.com/.
 
kf4rca said:
I wonder how many of those PC's were running W2K or XP and still running Internet Explorer instead of Chrome.
Probably not a good idea to hire an IT guy who doesn't know about https://krebsonsecurity.com/.
Click to expand...

Enterprise computers are generally not configurable by end users; it the enterprise migrates to Win 10 all systems will be upgraded and all will have the same browser and the same business software, depending on the department.
 
kf4rca said:
But it was my impression that all these updates from Microsoft are supposed to prevent this. Are the victims simply not keeping up with all the updates???
Click to expand...

Enterprise computers have updates scheduled by IT, generally at the corporate level. The end user does not have the ability to decide on whether to update.

Microsoft updates generally are patches to eliminate vulnerability to certain attacks. Windows has a basic firewall and anti-virus, but it will not prevent many kinds of ransomware and similar exploits.
 
RoddyFreeman said:
It's been in the trade press, but Entercom was the victim of a malware attack a few days ago.

Everything is down: email, sales systems, music selection, etc. The Atlanta stations sound normal on the air so I suppose the local people are doing a stellar job of handling things on individual computers.

I don't know when things will get back to normal, but email according to the trades might be down for another week.

I received the following message this morning in response to an email:

"We are currently experiencing technical issues with our email. Please contact our local markets via phones, or visit our web site at www.entercom.com to find our contact information."
Click to expand...

Apparently the security breach was reported to be a company wide issue when some of the outlets reported on the entercom incident specifically.
 
I have never heard of enterprise computers configurable by the end user. BUT, all IT departments are not created equally. Often its just one guy, or worse, contracted out.
And in the case of the City of Atlanta attack, with all the nepotism and cronyism that goes on down there, they may not have the best IT department around.
I sure hope this is not the problem at EnterCom
 
In may cases, when properly set up, enterprise computers have the USB ports shut down to prevent exactly this problem.
 
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