Swedish Radio Station Hacked, ISIS Recruitment Song Played on a Loop for 30 Minutes
It was a normal Friday morning on Mix Megapol, a popular radio station in Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden, when something strange happened to the signal. At around 8:30 am, just as the Gry and Anders show was playing Ed Sheeran and Carly Rae Jepson, an English language song entitled “For the Sake of Allah” started playing on a loop. For the next half hour, this ISIS recruitment song played over and over and over again. Call it an extend jihadist megamix.
Somehow Mix Megapol’s signal had been hacked by a “pirate transmitter.” (That’s misleading methinks. As the hosts didn’t notice anything from their on-air feed in the studio when this was all going down, the most likely method was a hack of the station’s studio-to-transmitter link.) At three minutes in length, the song played about 10 times before it could be stopped.
A police investigation has been launched. Meanwhile, you can bet that engineers in radio stations all over the world are checking to make sure all the passwords on their stations’ transmitter gear.
