The Philadelphia Inquirer is working intensively to restore systems affected by a cyberattack last weekend.
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The attack caused an outage, halting the print edition of the newspaper. However, Inquirer.com was only minimally affected, with minor delays in publishing and updating stories.
“The incident caused the biggest disruption to the publication of Pennsylvania’s largest news organization since the January 7-8, 1996, blizzard, and came just days before Tuesday’s primary,” said Jonathan Lai of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to fully restore systems and complete this investigation as soon as possible,” said Inquirer publishing spokeswoman Lisa Hughes.
"We will keep our employees and readers updated as we learn more.".
The news organization discovered the attack after its content management system went down Saturday morning. This came after Cynet Systems , a cybersecurity firm that oversees the Philadelphia Inquirer's network security , reported "anomaly" activity a few days earlier
After the incident was discovered, the publisher of the Inquirer newspaper announced that computers had been damaged due to illegal activity.
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Due to the attack, the regular edition of the Sunday newspaper was not printed and was only released as an electronic version online.
The Philadelphia Inquirer notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation and notified the company Kroll to investigate and address the cyberattack incident.
Hughes could not say who the perpetrators were or whether they were able to access sensitive information , but said the newspaper would notify those affected by the incident.
The Philadelphia Inquirer now has over 13 million monthly readers across its print edition, website and other platforms, many years after its first publication in 1829.
News Corporation, a media and publishing company that owns several newspapers, including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, MarketWatch, Fox News, Barron's, the Sun, and News UK, revealed that China-linked attackers accessed its network from February 2020 to January 2022, which it discovered in February 2023.
The malicious actors had access to an email and document storage system used by several News Corp businesses. Through this system, they had access to business documents and emails containing sensitive data and personal information of the companies' employees.
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In 2022, an illegal video content and advertising provider was used to spread malware to hundreds of newspaper websites in the US, while dozens of news websites in the US were hacked by the Evil Corpin order to infect employees of Fortune 500 companies with malware.
