Pulse FM

Pulse FM operatesunder the alias Pulse FM and is headquartered in Australia.
The organisation functions as a youth‑focused community radio station.
Its broadcast service is classified as a narrowcast FM transmission targeting a local audience.
As a community radio outlet, Pulse FM serves the youth demographic within its coverage area.
The station’s core offering consists of radio programming delivered over the air and, where available, via online streaming.

On 12 May 2017 Pulse FM was hit by a ransomware attack that formed part of a worldwide wave affecting tens of thousands of Windows systems.
The malicious software encrypted the station’s files and destroyed its existing backups.
The encryption led to significant loss of documents, videos and images, although portions of the audio library remained unaffected.
Investigations revealed that the ransomware gained entry by compromising the backup server while it was undergoing active maintenance.
Faced with the attack, Pulse FM’s management decided not to pay the ransom demanded by the perpetrators.
The decision was based on the attackers’ inability to correlate Bitcoin payments to specific infected devices.
In the aftermath, the station migrated its critical services to Linux‑based platforms to reduce reliance on Windows.
Operating systems across the remaining infrastructure were updated with the latest security patches.
Symantec Endpoint Protection was deployed to provide real‑time threat detection and prevention.
A multi‑layered backup strategy was instituted, incorporating offline storage media and mirrored server configurations.
These measures were designed to ensure data recoverability even if a future breach occurred. To help rebuild its music collection, another radio network supplied replacement audio content to Pulse FM.