Hacker wipes out whole season of TV show
A fired employee allegedly admits he erased syndicated children's series

By Eriq Gardner

updated 3/31/2011 7:49:03 PM ET

NEW YORK — The producer of the syndicated children's TV series "Zodiac Island" claims that an entire season of the show has been wiped out thanks to a fired employee at its data-hosting company who hacked into networked computers and destroyed its work.
"Zodiac Island" has run on more than 100 U.S. TV stations around the country, including ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS affiliates. The show is produced by Hawaii-based WER1 World Network, which signed up with Wisconsin-based ISP and data-hosting company CyberLynk.
According to a lawsuit that was filed last week in Hawaii District Court, a man named Michael Scott Jewson was terminated from CyberLynk. From his parents' residence, he allegedly accessed CyberLynk's data and intentionally wiped it out. Jewson is alleged to have been charged in February with a federal computer crime violation and admitted his guilt in a plea agreement.
The data breach allegedly knocked out 6,480 WER1 electronic files, or 300 gigabytes of data, comprising two years of work from hundreds of contributors globally, including animation artwork and live action video production.
The lost data is said to include fragments from 14 episodes of Zodiac Island, which WER1 says is impossible to reassemble or reproduce.
WER1 says it got some restitution as a result of Jewson's plea agreement, but is now suing CyberLynk and Jewson for breach of contract, negligence, conversion and computer fraud, saying that the company violated its contractual promises to provide secure data hosting.

They didn't have that lot backed up somewhere?

They didn't have that lot backed up somewhere?

They didn't have that lot backed up somewhere?

500GB Samsung Hard Disk - £29.00 from Scan

Just sayin'

If it's being recorded in proper broadcast quality HD and they're talking about the master footage rather than the edited 'final' copy, 500GB isn't actually going to get you all that far. You're talking more like 10TB of storage, on an array (obviously, since you can't get 10TB drives) which you have to connect either by fibre channel or over high speed network SAN storage. 29 quid would even buy you one the cables for that set up. rough guess? I'd say you could do it for about £15k.

Jon

The data breach allegedly knocked out 6,480 WER1 electronic files, or 300 gigabytes of data

Television season wiped by miffed ISP employee
Zodiac Island kids show destroyed
01 Apr 2011 15:45 | by Nick Farrell in Rome | posted in Business 2 Comments

An entire season of a kids TV programme was lost after a disgruntled former employee of the studio's ISP wiped all the video files.

Zodiac Island was in the can and all stored in 300GB of video files with the creator's ISP CyberLynk.

The series was wiped after CyberLynk fired Michael Jewson, who, in a fit of peak destroyed as many files as he could find.

One of the servers he cleaned was the CyberLynk FTP server which contained the WeR1's files including the entire season of "Zodiac Island" -- 6,480 files. The show's producers had been using the server for nearly a year as a drop box where contributors from the U.S., Manila, Beijing and Hong Kong could collaborate on episodes.

CyberLynk was supposed to have backed up the data, but CEO Adam Hobach told WeR1 that his company's backup procedure "had failed and/or was not properly instituted."

Thus two years of work was completely destroyed. Needless to say WeR1 is suing the ISP and Jewson.

"Zodiac Island" is broadcast on about 100 US TV stations. It tells of the adventures of animated characters and their real-life friends as they learn about "teamwork, sharing and how to be part of a loving community". We guess it is the sort of loving community that does not have one bloke getting miffed and deleting everything.

Apparently some data was retrieved but 65GB of the data was gone for good.

WeR1 said that the destroyed data includes fragments from each of the 14 episodes, it is now impossible to re-assemble any of the episodes in its entirety,WeR1 said.

Jewson has agreed to pay WeR1 $360,000 in damages, as part of a deal to reduce his sentence. The company doesn't believe he will be able to pay the full amount and wants cash from the ISP.

* EyeSee David Icke wishes to point out that although lizards are involved in the programme they are not from outer space and were mostly harmless. He would never advocate deleting lizards that are native to planet earth.

If it's being recorded in proper broadcast quality HD and they're talking about the master footage rather than the edited 'final' copy, 500GB isn't actually going to get you all that far. You're talking more like 10TB of storage, on an array (obviously, since you can't get 10TB drives) which you have to connect either by fibre channel or over high speed network SAN storage. 29 quid would even buy you one the cables for that set up. rough guess? I'd say you could do it for about £15k.

Jon

Knowing that my current video camera gives files that take up 40BG n hour for HD, I can well believe the huge amounts of storage professional video gear takes up. You have to remember that on top of the raw footage, for which there will be loads more than the series would use, there will be credits, effects shots (if any). A TV programme is a big investment - you would expect that to be protected by some form of offline backup.

Can someone do that to Eastenders?

and Coronation Street

and Emmerdale

and the X Factor

and I'm a sleb relaunch my career

No backups? Wow, how monumentally stupid of this firm!