More About the Hacked Radio Station

From this morning's Tom Taylor NOW newsletter...

It’s a like a real-life Halloween fun-house, because the off-shore hackers are still slipping into the cluster’s in-house network server every day and creating fresh horrors. After being dark for seven hours on the first day of the invasion, the stations did manage to get back on-air without paying the ransom of $500. (The hackers wanted it in untraceable Bitcoin currency.) But it’s a mess at Stannard Broadcasting-owned country KVVP Leesville (105.7), adult alternative KROK South Fort Polk (95.7) and AC “Mix 106.7” KUMX North Fort Polk. Radio World says the problem affects all three. The staff toiled through the weekend on the problem, complicated by the fact that one of the stations is installing a new transmitter. The irony is that the hackers probably don’t even know they penetrated a radio operation – they just know they gained control of a computer whose files they can mess with. One issue may be the Windows XP system used by the cluster, which is no longer supported by Microsoft. Automation provider RCS isn’t the service provider to Stannard, but its Dwight Douglas tells this NOW Newsletter that “We’ve been urging our stations to get off XP.”