WTEN website hacked?

[Skaggs]

Check out the NBC WAVE 3 banner at the top of the WTEN website this morning:

[Chris Miller]

Was it hacked or was it just a web designer playing around an accidently update the site to see how the Wave 3 banner would look like on their site? My bet would be on an accidental screwup.

[Skaggs]

WAVE 3 is the NBC station in Louisville, Kentucky. It is owned by Raycom Media and broadcasts from its main studio in downtown Louisville. From Wikipedia

WTEN is owned by Young Broadcasting. I suppose it is possible that it was a screwup, but since the stations aren't owned by the same company, it seems unlikely.

[scott]

But both sites are associated with WorldNow so the software WTEN uses probably has graphics for other WorldNow sites and someone probably clicked on the wrong graphic.

If the site was hacked, I imagine they would have done more than just change the graphic at the top of the home page.

[Skaggs]

From WTEN:

If you visited wten.com anytime between 12:00am and 9:00am Tuesday, you saw a bit of a funny problem. The large header graphic at the top of our homepage, where there is usually a WTEN logo, was replaced by those of WAVE - the NBC affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky.

This was not a problem on our end, but instead WorldNow, the company that oversees our site, as well as many others (including WAVE).

I will yield to an excerpt from an email I received Tuesday afternoon about the issue:

- Here’s the story with the problem you saw with your branding. During the overnight hours, some of the folders on our image server were reconfigured incorrectly. This resulted in the incorrect mapping for a few station images, including your branding image. The issue has been fully resolved this morning and all images should now be correct.

We sincerely apologize for the issue and we’re taking steps internally to remove the manual process that resulted in this error and move to a more automated system for the configurations. -

We were not the only ones. This was problem that numerous WorldNow web sites experienced when their image mapper went down. I was notified of the problem by Rob on Tuesday morning and had WorldNow take care of it immediately.

If you are viewing the wten.com page and are still seeing the WAVE graphic up top, simply clear your temporary internet files and things will be all good once again. If you do not know how to do that, I can show you.

Just letting everyone know, in case you were wondering.