A major IT incident that might have been a ransomware attack has hit the leading UK-based newspaper – The Guardian.
Staff was asked to work from home as a consequence of the issue, which started late on Tuesday evening and impacted some of the company’s technology infrastructure.
Moreover, certain services that operate in the background have been interrupted.
Digital content production is largely impacted; articles are still written and posted to the Guardian website and mobile app.
The enterprise expressed hope that it could still publish the print publication of Thursday’s newspaper.
News organizations are regularly the target of cyberattacks by both individual nations and cybercriminals, though at this moment the agency stated it considered the incident was probably a ransomware attempt. These involve hackers breaching into a computer system and making demands for the services to be restored.
The Guardian Media Group chief executive, Anna Bateson, and the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, told staff: “As everyone knows, there has been a serious incident which has affected our IT network and systems in the last 24 hours. We believe this to be a ransomware attack but are continuing to consider all possibilities.”
“We are continuing to publish globally to our website and apps and although some of our internal systems are affected, we are confident we will be able to publish in print tomorrow. Our technology teams have been working to deal with all aspects of this incident, with the vast majority of our staff able to work from home as we did during the pandemic.”
“We will continue to keep our staff and anyone else affected informed. We will update everyone again at the end of the day. With a few key exceptions, we would like everyone to work from home for the remainder of the week unless we notify you otherwise.”
“Thank you to everyone working hard throughout this incident to keep us publishing, looking after our readers, supporters, and advertisers, and keeping our core systems available for colleagues.”
Earlier in December AIIMS, a prestigious public health institute was hit by a cyber attack where around 1.3 TeraBytes data got encrypted in the attack and cyber security experts suspected China was behind the attack.
In October, the largest health insurance in Australia Medibank Private Ltd was a victim of a cyber attack that compromised the data of around 200 gigabytes and which probably affected millions of customers.
Yesterday, US cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks revealed that a Kremlin-linked hacking gang that is known for targeting Ukraine has currently increased its spying against Ukraine’s NATO partners in recent months.
