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.

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.

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.

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.