FuboTV cyberattack underlines persistent threat to streamers from hackers

Streaming platform FuboTV says disruption to its service during France vs Morocco Semi-Final at the FIFA World Cup 2022 was not related to any bandwidth constraints on Fubo’s part. Instead, it says, “we were the target of a criminal cyber attack”.

FuboTV says that once it detected the attack, it immediately took steps to contain the incident and worked to restore service to all of our users as quickly as possible. The company says: “We deeply regret the disruption caused by this incident”.

FuboTV has reported the incident to law enforcement and engaged incident response firm Mandiant to assist with the continuing investigation and response. “Our primary focus currently is on ensuring that the incident is fully contained and that there is no threat of further disruption for any of our customers,” it added in a statement. “Although no company can ever be immune from the risk of cyber attacks, we assure you that we are working diligently with experts to take all appropriate steps to remediate this incident and to prevent any similar incident from recurring in the future.”

FuboTV operates in the US, Canada, France and Spain and currently has around 1.23m subs. In the US, its biggest market, the company aggregates more than 125 live sports, news and entertainment networks. It has also been expanding into FAST. The company said it intends to be fully transparent regarding the attack, and will provide an update at an appropriate time “when we have more information to share”.

While content piracy is recognised as a widespread challenge for streamers, hacking is also an ongoing threat, according to companies like Akamai. So far, there have not been many successful high-profile hacks, though Amazon-owned Twitch was the victim of a major data breach in 2021. Disney+ also suffered a significant breach when it launched in 2019, and there has been an undercurrent of attacks against Netflix.