Formosa TV in Taiwan targeted by Chinese hackers, YouTube content changed

Formosa Television (FTV) announced an intensive series of cyberattacks while China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted live-fire military exercises.

The TV station was the only broadcast media in Taiwan to report a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, Department of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Deputy Director Wu Ming-ren said, adding that the network reported information security breaches on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and yesterday:

The cyberattacks have mainly affected FTV’s Web site and its live broadcast over YouTube. The YouTube content was changed by hackers on Saturday.

The television station has followed procedures outlined in the Cybersecurity Management Act to report the security breaches to the commission within one hour of their occurrence.

To prevent Chinese hackers from infiltrating Taiwan’s terrestrial and cable television networks, the commission has asked all broadcast media operators to carefully review their content before they are aired.

On Sunday, FTV in a statement said that its signal source host was hacked, causing content on its YouTube channel to be different from what it broadcast on TV.

The data breach affected only its live online content, the network said, adding that operations of its terrestrial and cable channels proceeded uninterrupted.

The other day, the world's largest networking vendor Cisco discovered that its corporate network was accessed by hackers after an employee's personal Google account was compromised.