Newly minted CEO of Nine Entertainment, Mike Sneesby, has praised the quick response of the company’s technology teams following last weekend’s cyber attack which targeted Nine’s corporate network.
Describing the cyber-attack as “significant in scale with high potential to disrupt our business”, Sneesby praised teams for their readiness for such an event which allowed Nine to mitigate the immediate impact to the business and set it up to “manage the clean-up in a structured manner”.
“The fast response from 9Technology in the early hours of Sunday morning was quickly followed by a coordinated operational response that kept our live broadcast capability up and running and minimised impacts to our broader business,” said the Nine CEO.
According to Chief Information & Technology Officer, Damian Cronan, “Our focus in the first 24 hours was on containment and we are confident our technology teams have isolated the attacker and the specific destructive activity that was initiated.
“The consequence of this containment strategy is that our corporate network has been disconnected from the internet, and all internal networks separated from one another (e.g. Broadcast from Publishing, Sydney from Melbourne etc). Other upstream and downstream providers have also been disconnected.
“This has been an effective strategy however, it also means several services that are dependent on the corporate network are not available. This will have a significant impact on business-as-usual processes across the organisation.
“Looking ahead, now that we are in a state of containment, we are working on recovering the most critical aspects of service delivery (on-air and print operations, revenue-driven services, and other critical business services). We will be carefully assessing how we bring back controlled levels of connectivity into the network with an emphasis on service restoration, and I want to be clear it will take time before all our systems are back up and running.
“It will challenge us and test our capabilities and creativity in problem solving but I can’t think of a more capable team than 9Technology to respond and meet this challenge.”
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