Weird TVB notifications push comes to shove for cops

Stacy Shi

Police officers from the cyber security and technology crime bureau have launched an investigation after a series of more than 20 consecutive weird push notifications were sent out via TVB's mobile app, some involving words like "John Lee."

The broadcaster said it has carried out multifaceted investigations and has immediately strengthened its system monitoring to prevent prevent the recurrence of similar incidents.

The app sent out 23 push notifications within 20 minutes involving strange content like "hihi," "testing," "curvediscuss" and "John Lee speaking to reporters."

Some messages in simplified Chinese, such as "uphold one country, two systems," "patriots rule Hong Kong" and "Pikachu to meet journalists" appeared later.

A website link that some said was for the notification system was also leaked, and the website was soon inaccessible.

At the same time, the TVB website was also down and kept displaying "There is no relevant news content at present." It returned to normal at around 12.30am yesterday.

TVB reported at 2am yesterday that its wireless information technology department had launched an interdepartmental investigation and was following up on whether the system was hacked.

According to TVB, cyber security and technology crime bureau officers have collected evidence in its offices at TVB City in the afternoon, and the broadcaster will fully cooperate with further in-depth investigations.

Francis Fong Po-kiu, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said the free-to-air station has to wait for the results of the investigation to know the cause.

"The next step is to trace the source and find out whether it is an external problem or internal mistakes," Fong said.

The incident also sparked heated discussion on online forums. Many people believed it was not hackers, commenting: "It's obvious that IT workers had regarded production as testing. If this was the case, they wouldn't be arrested, just fired."

And some worried about the staff member responsible, saying: "There must be someone to shoulder the responsibility, and it would be lucky if they're not convicted of political charges."