BUSINESS

Ransomware attack knocks some Sinclair television stations off the air

The company says hackers targeted several of its servers and workstations and took unspecified data

By Aaron Gregg and Hamza Shaban
Updated October 18, 2021 at 7:10 p.m. EDT | Published October 18, 2021 at 11:20 a.m. EDT

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article misstated the call letters of KHQA and the channel numbers of WLUK Fox 11. This article has been corrected.

Sinclair Broadcast Group was the target of a ransomware attack that disrupted operations this weekend at several television stations, the company said Monday in a regulatory filing.

The Hunt Valley, Md.-based company disclosed the breach in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing after the Record, an online publication owned by the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, reported that a number of its television stations had been affected.

Sinclair is the latest in a growing list of businesses, schools, hospitals and other institutions to face ransom demands from hackers who use malware to encrypt data on their computer systems, rendering them unusable. As of Monday afternoon, it was unclear who was responsible for the hack.

The shadow industry of online extortionists, often led by Russian criminal groups, pulled in more than $400 million last year, according to Chainalysis, a firm that tracks cryptocurrency payments. The White House has made fighting ransomware a priority, and President Biden has urged President Vladimir Putin to rein in ransomware criminals operating out of Russia.

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By Aaron Gregg
Aaron Gregg is a business reporter for the Washington Post. Twitter https://twitter.com/Post_AG

By Hamza Shaban
Hamza Shaban is a visual enterprise reporter for the Business Desk. He joined The Washington Post in 2017 as a technology reporter. Previously, he covered tech policy for BuzzFeed News. Twitter https://twitter.com/hshaban