GENERAL CLOSING SESSION

Room D281-282

Cybersecurity for Broadcast Stations

Panelists:

      • Tracy Cleeton, Chief Technology Officer, Saga Communications, Inc.
      • Phil Hoffman, PhD., Assistant Dean of Media & General Manager, Ball State University PBS & IPR
      • John B. Nicholas, PhD, Director, Center for Information and Communication Sciences, Ball State University
      • Wayne Pecena, CPBE, CBNE, Associate Director Information Technology, Educational Broadcast Services, Texas A&M University
      • Shane Toven, SBE CPBE CBNE, Senior Broadcast Engineer, Educational Media Foundation (K-LOVE/Air1)

Protecting your station’s infrastructure has never been more challenging. TV and radio stations have been subject to hacks of their RDS and EAS systems, ransomware attacks, and malware attacks. What can you do to protect your operations and ensure that you are able to serve your audience? Our closing session features a panel of cybersecurity experts from a wide range of backgrounds and experience covering:

      • Cybersecurity basics: We’ll discuss defense in depth, network segmentation, and least privilege and penetration testing as the “Proof of Performance” for broadcast IT systems.
      • Cybersecurity best practices: Hear examples of how hacks have occurred in some high-profile areas, including how the Colonial Pipeline hack happened. Ransomware and should you pay? Backing up data, and how to implement a hybrid approach.
      • The human element: Even with the best cybersecurity measures in place, the users are the ultimate line of defense (and in many cases the weakest link). Also some “common sense” matters that even small stations can take, and some common misconceptions
      • The changing landscape: Over the last decade, everything we learned to do has changed, including: the shift to testing patches before we apply them to needing to hit short windows for deployments; the shift from wanting multiple vendors and tools for threat hunt to wanting a single expansive pane of glass. The use of AI in the attack space and the need for AI to counter it.

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