New Nine CEO MIKE SNEESBY responds to crippling Cyber-Attack

In what can only be described as a ‘Baptism By Fire’, freshly appointed Nine CEO Mike Sneesby has been forced to respond to one of worst corporate cyber-attacks in Australian history.

On his first official day in the job, CEO Mike Sneesby found himself at the centre of an attack from rogue forces which crippled the companies television newsrooms across the country, forcing employees to abandon computers and adopt production techniques last used in the ’90s.

The sophisticated attack, which TV Blackbox has previously reported is likely to have originated from Russia, left the network unable to broadcast any live programming from Sydney on Sunday and is now expected to take weeks before systems are fully recovered.

Nine’s publishing and radio arms were not directly affected by the attack, however security measures implemented since have significantly restricted employee’s ability to conduct their regular work.

In a statement to Nine employees issued late last night, Sneesby thanked his team for their hard work in keeping the network operational.

“The cyber-attack we experienced over the weekend was significant in scale with high potential to disrupt our business however, your readiness for such an event and your actions in responding have allowed us to mitigate the immediate impact to our business and set us 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.

Over the last 48 hours, I’ve seen countless cases of leadership, ingenuity and resilience as we pivoted quickly in key areas of our business to operate around current limitations.

A number of our core systems remain offline as we work to carefully return services.”

Sneesby went on to add that teams would need to;

“remain focussed across impacted business areas as we prioritise our technology resources to bring systems back online – I’d like to thank all involved and all impacted for your incredible response so far and your ongoing commitment.”

Nine’s Chief Information & Technology Officer, Damian Cronan added that the network had been successful in implementing a containment strategy;

“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). From today, our technology teams are focusing on these priorities.”