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Hacker wipes out whole season of TV show
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ProfessorF
What's a life?
Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:56 pm Posts: 12030
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 |  |  |  | Quote: 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. |  |  |  |  |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42366946/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/?gt1=43001
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 7:26 pm |
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HeatherKay
Moderator
Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:13 pm Posts: 7262 Location: Here, but not all there.
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They didn't have that lot backed up somewhere? 
_________________My Flickr | Snaptophobic BloggageHeather Kay: modelling details that matter. "Let my windows be open to receive new ideas but let me also be strong enough not to be blown away by them." - Mahatma Gandhi.
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 7:29 pm |
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Amnesia10
Legend
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 2:02 am Posts: 29240 Location: Guantanamo Bay (thanks bobbdobbs)
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Just get it from bit torrent? 
_________________Do concentrate, 007... "You are gifted. Mine is bordering on seven seconds." https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg5MzczNTkhttp://astore.amazon.co.uk/wwwx404couk-21
Last edited by Amnesia10 on Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:16 pm |
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Spreadie
I haven't seen my friends in so long
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:06 pm Posts: 6355 Location: IoW
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Can someone do that to Eastenders? and Coronation Street and Emmerdale and the X Factor and I'm a sleb relaunch my career 
_________________ Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes; after that, who cares?! He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:39 pm |
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paulzolo
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:27 pm Posts: 12251
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+1 Bloody idiots for not having backups. Serves them right, really.
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:59 pm |
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Nick
Spends far too much time on here
Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 11:36 pm Posts: 3527 Location: Portsmouth
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If I was a customer of CyberLynk I would be very concerned, and urgently arranging to get my own backups of any data they were supposedly storing securely.
No backups?Wow, how monumentally stupid of this firm!
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:40 pm |
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jonbwfc
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:26 pm Posts: 17040
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Depends on who he was and what he had access to. If he had access to enough security privileges, he could have erased the backups too. They'd need an offsite, offline backup to restore. Some places have that, some don't. Some places, that costs extra and the production company may not have paid for it. Without knowing the whole story, it's hard to say exactly what data security measures were in place and what/how they were breached. Whatever backup regime you have, if someone has enough security rights, knowledge and intent it's very hard to stop them being circumvented. Jon
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 10:18 pm |
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rustybucket
I haven't seen my friends in so long
Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:10 pm Posts: 5837
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500GB Samsung Hard Disk - £29.00 from ScanJust sayin'
_________________Jim
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 10:29 pm |
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jonbwfc
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:26 pm Posts: 17040
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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
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 10:41 pm |
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rustybucket
I haven't seen my friends in so long
Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:10 pm Posts: 5837
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_________________Jim
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Sat Apr 02, 2011 10:50 pm |
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ProfessorF
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:56 pm Posts: 12030
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More on this:  |  |  |  | Quote: 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. |  |  |  |  |
http://www.techeye.net/business/television-season-wiped-by-miffed-isp-employee
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Sun Apr 03, 2011 12:02 am |
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paulzolo
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:27 pm Posts: 12251
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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.
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Sun Apr 03, 2011 9:15 am |
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Amnesia10
Legend
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 2:02 am Posts: 29240 Location: Guantanamo Bay (thanks bobbdobbs)
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Or better still a drive back up which can be taken offsite. Or a tape backup.
_________________Do concentrate, 007... "You are gifted. Mine is bordering on seven seconds." https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg5MzczNTkhttp://astore.amazon.co.uk/wwwx404couk-21
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Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:36 am |
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dogbert10
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_________________ i7 860 @ 3.5GHz, GTX275, 4GB DDR3
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Sun Apr 03, 2011 1:41 pm |
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l3v1ck
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Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:27 pm |
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