For the second time in three years The Washington Post’s servers have been hacked, with hackers gaining access to employee usernames and passwords. The Washington Post suspects that the hacker or hackers may be from anywhere in Asia but suspect that Chinese hackers were behind this intrusion as well as an attack in 2011 on the newspapers job-seeker database, as well as month long breaches at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The reason for this suspicion being that the latest intrusion started from a sever used by the newspaper’s foreign staff. Although The Washington Post and all it’s employees use encrypted passwords, the company has recommended to all it’s employees to change their usernames and passwords straight away.
Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti had this to say;
“This is an ongoing investigation, but we believe the attack lasted no longer than a few days at the most”
As stated before, this isn’t the first time The Washington Post has found itself vulnerable to cyber attacks. With the attack in June 2011 securing hackers about 1.27 million usernames and e-mail addresses belonging to those people who were registered and looking for employment on The Washington Post Jobs Website at the time of the attack. However like in the most recent case no personal information was taken or affected. We will post more information as it becomes available.
Thank you CNET for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of youtwitface.
