Hackers hijack radio stations to air a furry podcast
You don't need to take anyone hostage -- or even enter the building -- to get airplay these days.
In the kind of story we should probably get used to hearing, Ars Technica digs into an incident Tuesday morning where someone redirected multiple radio stations including KIFT and KXAX to broadcast an archived episode of a NSFW podcast for the furry community. It's not clear who was responsible, but it appears to be linked to a coordinated effort to compromise Barix boxes many radio stations use to stream content for broadcasts. As we've seen with security cameras, baby monitors, cars and other connected devices, if something is left exposed to the wider internet with a default or weak password, hackers can and probably will access it.
This morning, our remote encoders that send audio to our transmitter site was hacked. We want to appologize to anyone...
Posted by Texas 104.3 & 102.5 - KXAX on Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Finding these devices is as easy as using the Shodan search engine that indexes what's connected to the internet and where. According to Radio Insight, engineers needed to do a hard reset just to regain control over their own hardware. While radio stations are now getting advice on securing their hardware, it's really a warning relevant to any devices we connect to our networks.
