French TV channel was hacked after an interview with an employee on the background of stickers with passwords

For several days now, a story has been developing with hacking of the internal network and social media accounts of the French television channel TV5Monde, whose work for a while was simply paralyzed as a result of the activities of hackers who consider themselves to be supporters of the Islamic state. Service servers responsible for processing email, video editing, and broadcasting were disabled.

An attack on the resources of TV5 Monde by anonymous crackers began on Wednesday evening around 22:00 in Paris (/ 23: 00 Moscow time), breaking the protection of the official website of the channel and its pages on social networks. Toward midnight, the broadcast was interrupted - the channel disappeared from the air, instead of the image for several hours at frequencies of TV5 Monde, there was a black screen without sound, occasionally switching to a splash screen with the channel logo.
For some time on Facebook’s TV5 Monde account on Facebook, you could watch photos of people in black clothes and Arab shawls with the caption “Cyber ​​Caliphate” and “I am IG”. Among the reports were threats against French troops participating in operations against Islamists in Africa and the Middle East.
As Yves Bigot, director general of the company, admitted, for several hours the specialists were "unable to transmit a signal through any of the channels." “We are gradually starting to restore broadcasting in a number of regions,” he told France-Presse. - Our systems have suffered extremely seriously, we are talking about an attack of unprecedented power. Many hours, if not days, will take full recovery. ” TASS

A little later, interesting details began to come to light, indicating that the starting point for the attack on TV5Monde could be an interview with reporter David Delos, where they involuntarily lit up at least one company password on social networks. The fact is that it was shot against the background of a desk of a bureau employee who literally was buried in stickers with passwords for channel accounts in popular social networks.



The plot got usernames and passwords for the official Twitter and Instagram accounts of the channel, but it was too difficult to parse on the entries in the official archive of the programs. However, on YouTube, the video quality turned out to be better, which, apparently, allowed attackers to pick up the correct password. Twitter user pent0thal confirmed that the account password displayed on the screen was “lemotdepassedeyoutube”, which can be translated from French as “YouTube password”.