Formosa Television (FTV) reported an intensive series of cyberattacks while China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted live-fire military exercises, the National Communications Commission said yesterday.
The television 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 (吳銘仁) 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,” Wu said. “The YouTube content was changed by hackers on Saturday.”
The volume of the cyberattacks varied from 3 to 10 megabits per second, he said, adding that they had eased by yesterday.
The television station has followed procedures outlined in the Cybersecurity Management Act (資通安全管理法) to report the security breaches to the commission within one hour of their occurence, Wu said, adding that the network also adopted measures to address the security breaches within 72 hours.
There are two types of DDoS attack, Wu said.
One is to block access to a Web site by using Internet protocol packets to cause severe bandwidth congestion and the other is to overwhelm a Web site by drastically increasing the number of user applications linked to it, he said.
FTV has multiple ways to defend its network from both types of DDoS attack, he said.
“The television station can ask Internet service providers [ISPs] to deal with cyberattacks or use Web application firewalls to isolate its network from certain user applications,” Wu said.
“ISPs can use gateways to block offshore Internet protocol addresses, or the television station can build a separate network to diversify the risks of cyberattacks,” he said.
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, Wu said.
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 breach affected only its live online content, the network said, adding that operations of its terrestrial and cable channels proceeded uninterrupted.
“We were notified about the incident at 8:52pm on Saturday and removed the content by 8:54pm,” FTV said. “We have been handling cyberattacks that have happened recently to ensure the safety of our broadcast.”
Screenshots taken by FTV viewers showed that the network’s YouTube channel displaying pro-China statements, including: “China’s territorial sovereignty cannot be interfered by outsiders,” “I would like to use the youth of our generation to defend the prosperous China” and “Public opinion must not be violated, and playing with fire will surely set oneself on fire.”
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the