data risk management Archives - John Sileo, Cyber Security Training

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China Hacks Wall Street Journal. Is Your Business Next?

Quick! Name a major international newspaper that wasn’t hacked last week. It might be harder than you think.

Last Wednesday, The New York Times announced on its front page that it had been hacked over the course of four months by state-sponsored cyber criminals in China. The Times said that Bloomberg News had also recently been targeted. The following day, The Wall Street Journal said it too had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers. Next up was the Associated Press, acknowledging similar data security breaches.

According to The Times, it was breached thanks to a spear-phishing attack, at which point the hackers uploaded an array of malware to the company network and started stealing email passwords of reporters, editors and other employees.

This all stems from an October 2012 story written in the paper about the family of the Chinese prime minister quietly amassing a multi-billion-dollar fortune in recent years. Apparently, they were looking for sources used in the investigation that might be revealed in the email accounts of Times reporters and editors.

Data security dealt another body blow as Twitter gets hacked

About 250,000 Twitter accounts may have been hacked last week. Was yours one of them?

On Friday, the company announced via its official blog that it has reset the passwords for those users after a breach was detected in which email addresses, usernames and encrypted password data may have been accessed by hackers.

The blog post was quick to point out that other companies such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have recently fallen victim to data security breaches as well, though those attacks appear to have been state-sponsored (check back here tomorrow for more on those breaches).

There has been no indication as of yet that the infiltration of Twitter was related to those incidents. However, Bob Lord, the company’s director of information security and author of the blog post, said he does not believe this was an isolated event, and that the attack was sophisticated and not “not the work of amateurs.”