Dish Network Finally Acknowledges Huge Hack After Days of Not Answering Questions
upstart writes:
Dish Network Finally Acknowledges Huge Hack After Days Of Not Answering Questions:
Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company's employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they'd experienced an ambiguous "systems issue."
Five days in and it was finally revealed that the company had been hacked, subjected to a ransomware attack, and subscriber data had been compromised. But, of course, customers didn't find out from Dish, they only learned about it via leaked internal communications:
Dish has told employees that it's "investigating a cybersecurity incident" and that it's "aware that certain data was extracted" from its IT systems as a result of this incident, according to an internal email sent by CEO Erik Carlson and obtained by The Verge. This comes on the fifth day of an internal outage that's taken down some of the company's internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com.
Employees have been completely locked out of their systems, telling Bleeping Computer that they're seeing blank screen icons common during ransomware attacks. As of this writing, things are so bad at Dish that their primary website is a placeholder page, though at least they finally got around to confirming things in an ambiguous statement.
You might recall that Dish Network was part of a doomed Trump-era plan to justify the T-Mobile Sprint merger by encouraging Dish to build its own 5G network. That plan isn't going so well either, and similar to T-Mobile's comical inability to secure its network, you have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted the company from competent revisions to its privacy and security standards.
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