Wyoming Radio Station Goes Off-air after Apparent Hack Blasts Racist Audio Loop

The original story by Vince Tropea for County 10.

Listeners tuning in to 90.1 FM KRWY over the weekend didn’t get music, news, or the usual programming. Instead, they got something that sounded like an emergency alert — followed by a repeating, racially-charged recording filled with slurs.

According to County 10, the alarm was raised on Saturday, Dec. 13, after the outlet received calls from both the Lander and Riverton police chiefs. The reason: multiple KRWY listeners had contacted law enforcement to report the station appeared to have been hacked.

The station — which is not affiliated with County 10 radio stations — had stopped airing regular content and was instead broadcasting the same one-minute clip on a loop.

The recording reportedly started with something resembling a standard Emergency Alert System (EAS) attention tone. A voice then told listeners to visit a specific YouTube channel. After that, it shifted into a rewritten nursery rhyme packed with racial slurs aimed at African Americans, with someone shouting the same slur repeatedly for roughly 45 seconds before the EAS-like tone returned — and the whole thing started over again.

County 10 said it is not sharing the YouTube channel name or the audio itself, citing concerns that interacting with the channel could expose people to malware or further hacking attempts.

It’s still unclear how long the recording had been airing on 90.1 FM, but as of County 10’s posting, the station’s owners had taken KRWY off the air until they can sort out what happened.

This wasn’t a one-off. Similar broadcast hijackings have been reported in other parts of the country in recent weeks, including an ESPN station in Houston, where the station publicly acknowledged its signal had been hacked and said it was working to fix it.

Those other incidents reportedly included the same general pattern: an EAS-like tone, a voice directing listeners to a YouTube channel, and a string of profanity and racist content.

After multiple reports nationwide, the Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issued a notice on Nov. 26 warning broadcasters to tighten up security — especially around studio-to-transmitter systems.

The FCC said the recent hacks appear tied to compromised studio-transmitter links, with attackers often getting in through improperly secured Barix equipment and redirecting the station’s audio feed to attacker-controlled content. In other words: the station itself may still be operating normally at the studio, while the transmitter is being fed something completely different.

The FCC urged stations to:

• Apply manufacturer security patches and keep firmware/software updated;
• Change default passwords and use stronger ones (and rotate them regularly);
• Put critical broadcast gear behind firewalls and limit remote access using properly configured VPNs;
• Monitor EAS systems and audit logs for suspicious activity;
• Follow broadcast security best practices outlined by federal advisory groups.

The agency also encouraged stations that suspect unlawful access to contact equipment manufacturers or security firms, notify the FCC Operations Center, and report cyberattacks to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

For now, KRWY is off-air — and the incident is another reminder that even old-school radio isn’t immune from modern cyberattacks.