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

The history of breaking into the internal network and accounts on the social networks of the French TV channel TV5Monde has been developing for several days now. For some time, the work of which was simply paralyzed by hackers who consider themselves to be supporters of the Islamic state. The service servers responsible for processing e-mail, video editing and signal broadcasting were disabled.

Anonymous hackers launched an attack on TV5 Monde’s resources on Wednesday evening around 10:00 pm Paris time (/ 23:00 Moscow time), revealing the protection of the official website of the TV channel and its pages on social networks. Closer to midnight the television broadcasting was interrupted - the channel disappeared from the air, instead of a picture for several hours on TV5 Monde frequencies there was a black screen without sound, occasionally switching to a splash screen with the channel's logo.
For some time in the TV5 Monde account on Facebook it was possible to observe photos of people in black clothes and Arab scarves with the signature “Cyber-Caliphate” and “I-IG”. Among the messages were published threats to the French military personnel involved in operations against the Islamists in Africa and the Middle East.
As the company's general director Yves Bigo acknowledged, for several hours the specialists were “unable to transmit the signal through any of the channels”. “Gradually, we are starting to restore broadcasting in a number of regions,” he told France-Presse. - Our systems are extremely seriously affected, we are talking about the attack of unprecedented power. Full hours will take many hours, if not days. ” Tass

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



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