In the afternoon and early evening of November 19th, Radio IQ’s back-up audio signal was hacked and aired an unauthorized recording over 89.7fm in the Richmond area.
Listeners like you were quick to alert us – thank you. Still others were able to get a recording of the offensive material that made its way on to our air. We have reported the incident to authorities and they are continuing their investigation into the hack with help of your recordings.
First, our sincere apologies for allowing the offensive material to get out over the air. We are taking many steps to make sure this never happens again.
In brief, the hacker was able to hijack our BACK-UP audio feed from Roanoke to Richmond. We have a sensor that starts the back-up feed when it hears “dead-air” or silence on the main audio feed. Our engineers have to manually switch back to the main channel when it becomes available again.
Yesterday we had some dead-air that triggered the switch to back-up audio where an unauthorized audio loop was placed by the hacker. Luckily our main audio feed from studio to transmitter was not intercepted. Normally a listener would not have noticed, but, given the offensive material on the back-up audio stream it was immediately noticeable, and was quickly switched back by station engineering.
At any point in time if you have questions or want to alert the station to problems with our signal, please use our toll-free number 800 856 8900 and follow the prompts from there. You can either leave a message OR there is also a way to report emergencies from the outgoing prompt (even if it happens after normal business hours).
If you have more detailed questions – I would be happy to get them answered by our technical staff by e-mailing them to wvtf@vt.edu.
Thank you again for your support and listenership, and, again, our sincere apologies for those who experienced this offense.