The Washington Post acknowledged today that a sophisticated phishing attack against its newsroom reporters led to the hacking of its Web site, which was seeded with code that redirected readers to the Web site of the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group. According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the hack began with a phishing campaign launched over the weekend that ultimately hooked one of the paper’s lead sports writers.
Cyber espionage hackers who broke into security firm Bit9 initially breached the company’s defenses in July 2012, according to evidence being gathered by security experts investigating the incident. Bit9 remains reluctant to name customers that were impacted by the intrusion, but the custom-made malicious software used in the attack was deployed last year in highly targeted attacks against U.S. Defense contractors.
The Washington Post was among several major U.S. newspapers that spent much of 2012 trying to untangle its newsroom computer networks from a Web of malicious software thought to have been planted by Chinese cyberspies, according to a former information technology employee at the paper.
I’ve been hearing from a number of readers who followed me here from the Security Fix blog at The Washington Post, asking if I plan to resume my bi-weekly “live” chats wherein I attempt to field questions from readers about… Read More »
