Station Hacked By Russians! Allegedly.
Each year at this time XHRM (Magic 92.5)/San Diego presents The Firecracker 500, a feature that counts down the 500 biggest songs of all-time, as voted by its listeners. As PD R Dub! helpfully explains, “It’s one of our most-listened to events on the radio station and this year received over one million votes!”
Last night, around 9:32pm, however, as the show was nearing its grand finale, something decidedly strange happened, as Dub! relates, “All the jocks were in the studio just beginning to announce the No. 1 song, when we started hearing weird sounds in our headphones, followed by our mics being completely shut off and our board frozen.” He continued, “We were suddenly and completely powerless and without any control of our studio, as audio from another site suddenly took over our frequency. Nothing we did to try to turn this pirate audio off seemed to work, so we frantically called our engineers and IT department for help. Meanwhile, Moscow Radio had somehow taken over our station and countdown, announcing their own No. 1 song, and it was bad. Really, really bad. Horrific,” Dub! said, struggling to repress the memory. “We even tried to turn down the studio monitors, but nothing worked!”
“Thankfully, America triumphed in the end, as Dub! told us, “After about four minutes, IT and engineering were able to help us regain control of our radio station, using some tricks they saw on a 1987 episode of MacGyver involving paperclips, reel-to-reel tape, a stale box of bagels brought in by a local label rep, and an Iggy Azalea promo CD.” Dub concluded, “We apologize to our listeners, and we are taking measures to ensure this never happens again, including upgrading all of our hardware from Windows Vista to XP. We think that will help… at least from the research we conducted using Ask Jeeves.” Audio of the hacked broadcast has been posted online, along with a dramatic video re-enactment.
