Dish customers struggle with service disruptions weeks after ransomware attack

March 24, 2023 – Published on SC Media

Dish Network customers continue to grapple with service disruptions and technical issues a month after the satellite TV giant was hit by a ransomware attack. 

Beginning on Feb. 23, Dish suffered a multiday outage that hamstrung customer service offerings and billing functions. In a Feb. 28 SEC filing, Dish confirmed that it was due to a cyberattack, which may have resulted in the leak of customer data.  

Dish has since not released further information about the incident investigation progress but said in a Wednesday statement that it would still “take a little more time” to fully restore the system.  

While the statement noted that the payment system is enabled and the call center capacity continues to increase daily, many customers complained they are still having payment issues and are not able to contact customer service.  

Dish did not respond to SC Media’s inquiry about when the system will be fully restored and how many customers’ data has been impacted. 

Drew Schmitt, GRIT lead analyst at GuidePoint Security’s consulting team, said that most large organizations like Dish can recover its core capability from a cyberattack within weeks, but it usually takes much longer to fully restore all functionality to pre-attack capabilities, with some taking up to almost a year. 

Read More HERE.