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.”

TVEyes core server & engineering workstations were targeted by a ransomware attack and caused an outage.
We are rebuilding the system & expect to have TVEyes back online soon, but do not have an exact ETA. We appreciate your patience & will provide updates as they are available.

— TVEyes, Inc. (@TVEyesInc) January 31, 2020

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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