Marketron Hit By Russian Cyber Attack

• Late Sunday RAMP learned that Marketron had been the victim of a serious cyber attack that has affected all Marketron customers. A Sunday evening client email from Marketron CEO Jim Howard, obtained by RAMP, reads, in part, “Marketron has been hit with a cyberattack from the Russian criminal organization BlackMatter. Currently, all Marketron customers are impacted. This issue comes despite significant recent investments in separating backup and disaster recovery in different physical and network environments, instituting ‘zero trust’ access management policies, and new security detection and recovery tools. We have not yet discovered how the hackers exploited our networks. While security and rapid disaster recovery have been top priorities, we obviously have not done enough. We know you count on us to keep your business operational, and we are extremely sorry for this impact.

Howard’s memo continues, “Marketron is communicating with BlackMatter as well as the FBI. All available resources are being applied to restoring systems as quickly as possible. This includes working with third-party security experts and bringing in additional resources. We are focused on restoring service as soon as possible and will continue to communicate about the situation. Additional details on the breach will be provided when available.” Marketron is keeping customers updated on the situation via this status page.

• At press time, the status page said, “Currently, all Marketron services are offline. The Pitch platform is online and currently not impacted. Marketron Traffic, Visual Traffic Cloud, Exchange and Advertiser Portal have all been impacted. RadioTraffic and RepPak services were not impacted; however, out of an abundance of caution they were taken offline. We hope to restore RadioTraffic service soon.”