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One of the largest American media holdings News Corp has been hacked

One of the world’s largest media holdings, News Corp, founded in 1979 by Rupert Murdoch, has been hacked by China-linked hackers.

Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that Chinese “government” hackers were behind the attack. The same information is provided in the publication owned by News Corp edition of The Wall Street Journal.

The attack occurred last month and is believed to have gained access to emails and documents of journalists and employees of “a number of publications and business units, including The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, The New York Post, a British newspaper owned by the company, as well as News Corp headquarters.” Such a leak is definitely the job of spyware, but as the ongoing investigation states, it was not solitare.

It is known that the hack occurred through one of the company’s third-party cloud providers.

They were rooting around in those systems since at least February, 2020.the Journal’s Alexandra Bruell says to The Washington Post.
David Wong
David Wong

News Corp stated that it discovered the attack on January 20, 2022, after which it hired the information security company Mandiant to investigate the incident, and also notified law enforcement agencies about the incident. Although the investigation is still ongoing, Mandiant reports that attackers “acting in the interests of the Chinese government” were behind the attack.

There is no clear evidence that the Chinese government is behind the hack, but there is a clear “China nexus”. It is likely that the hackers are involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence in the interests of China.said David Wong, vice president of the cyber company Mandiant.

It is worth noting that News Corp owns other media outlets besides those listed above, including The Sun, Barron’s, The Australian, The Times and Market Watch, as well as Realtor.com real estate portal and HarperCollins publishing house. The latter do not appear to have been the target of the attackers, who apparently focused their attack on the company’s news business.

Experts are even optimistic that the hack is limited to emails and Google Docs, including draft articles by some journalists. This means that the hackers probably haven’t gained access to the most sensitive conversations with sources that journalists, according to the advice of security experts, have using encrypted messaging apps.

Let me remind you that we talked about the fact that Three Chinese APT Groups Attack Major Telecommunications Companies, and also that Chinese hackers use a new backdoor to spy on the country’s government from Southeast Asia.

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Daniel Zimmermann

Daniel Zimmermann has been writing on security and malware subjects for many years and has been working in the security industry for over 10 years. Daniel was educated at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany and currently lives in New York.

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