Ransomware Hits Media Monitoring Company ‘TV Eyes’

The latest ransomware has attacked ‘TV Eyes,’ a company that offers campaign monitoring services to TV and radio news broadcasts. PR agencies and newsrooms across the world mostly use TV Eyes service to keep a trace of their broadcast. “The ransomware infected the business somewhere around post-midnight on Thursday, 30th of January,” said TV Eyes CEO David Ives in a conversation with ZDNet. The ransomware has damaged crucial TV Eyes servers and communications workstations, affecting the network mainly in the US, along with some other areas.

“We are still calculating the total damage caused by the ransomware to the company’s network. However, the company has begun making retrieval attempts,” said David to ZDNet. He further says, “TV Eyes is not thinking of paying the ransom demanded by the hackers. Instead, we are reviving the situation from existing backups and focusing on strengthening the affected network infrastructure.” “MMS (Media Monitoring Suite), the main product of the TV Eyes company, is not in function since the last 2 days,” according to various sources at PR agencies that worked with TV Eyes.

The TV Eyes service gives a platform that allows agencies in monitoring TV telecasts and Radio broadcasts mainly in the U.S (state and other 210 markets) and influential global media organizations. The Media Monitoring Suite-MMS permits the users to seek beyond podcasts for new keywords and also set up an email account for notifications of new events. TV Eyes is a very helpful tool for several journalists, PR agencies, and political parties for campaigning. David says there’s no news confirming the comeback of the TV Eyes service in the near time. However, the company is working to restore services as soon as possible.

“The kind of services that companies like TV Eyes offer is often an easy target for the hackers because they know how much dependent and reliable the users of these tools are. Therefore, hackers know that such companies are vulnerable as their users are relying on them for the safety of their data,” says Paul Martini, CEO, Iboss (cloud security company). The users of the TV Eyes service are concerned about the privacy of their data, which contains crucial financial information too.