Andre Yoskowitz
31 Mar 2014 16:34
According to Google security engineers, the world's top news organizations have been and are under current attack from state-sponsored hacking attacks.
At least 21 of the world's 25 largest international news organizations have been targeted.
Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google, says "journalists were massively over-represented" among targets of attacks, and that the hackers were working for or in a support of a government. Huntley and co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire presented the paper at a Black Hat conference.
"If you're a journalist or a journalistic organization we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from," Huntley added. It is unclear how Google monitors the attacks but Huntley says the search giant "tracks the state actors that attack our users."
The news is none too surprising, given that Forbes, the Financial Times and New York Times have all admitted to being successfully attacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers. The Google researchers claim that one major news outlet was recently attacked by Chinese hackers via a fake questionnaire emailed to staff.