In an e-mail to customers CEO Jim Howard said the cyberattack came from the Russian criminal organization BlackMatter. All Marketron customers may experience an interruption in service. Howard says the company has not yet discovered how its network was exploited.
Howard says Marketron is communicating with BlackMatter and the FBI. “All available resources are being applied to restoring systems as quickly as possible. This includes working with third-party security experts and bringing in additional resources. While security and rapid disaster recovery have been top priorities, we obviously have not done enough. We know you count on us to keep your business operational, and we are extremely sorry for this impact.”
As of this morning, all Marketron services were offline.
The Pitch platform is online and currently not impacted.
Marketron Traffic, Visual Traffic Cloud, Exchange and Advertiser Portal have all be impacted. RadioTraffic and RepPak services were not impacted; however, out of an abundance of caution they were taken offline.
Impacted products include:
· Marketron Traffic
· Visual Traffic Cloud
· RadioTraffic
· Marketron Exchange products for all traffic clients, including Electronic Orders and Invoices, Network Connect, Proof of Performance and PayNow
· Advertiser Portal
· Traffic Portal
· RepPak
This is why I dislike Cloud Computing. I prefer local servers even if supposedly the big datacenter IT guys have more robust security than us local operations. They are much larger targets. And the latest hacking tools are way ahead of the security tools. Offense is stronger than defense. Which is why I had to say goodbye to my iPhone 6 since Apple refuses to support security updates for it as of August. They drew the line at the iPhone 6S. Welcome to the latest edition of global IT warfare.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Russian IT Mafia group Black Matter might have deposited their tool kit into end user computers at radio stations and used that vector to break into Marketron and other services. Who knows how many computers globally have dormant seeds waiting to be used by this type of hacker. Heck, “legitimate” governments have bought many of the same tools for cyber warfare. Not sure it makes them less criminal.
This will have a major impact on small to medium sized radio groups. It shows how important it is for our industry to invest in security measures (and employee training) to protect stations and advertisers. All Marketron owned solutions are down, Pitch is safe as it’s a white-label offering by Frequence.