Of the 25 largest news organizations in the world, 21 have been targets of cyberattacks that may have been government-authorized, according to two network engineers working at Google.
While many Internet users are subject to email attacks aimed at stealing their personal data, journalists are overwhelmingly favored by attackers, said Shane Hadley, a security software engineer at Google.
The attacks were launched by hackers who either work for or support a government and specifically target journalists, say Hadley and Google's other network engineer, Morgan Markey-Board.
Their report was presented today at a conference of so-called Black Hat hackers in Singapore (ed. A "black hat" hacker is someone who violates the security of computers for no other reason than personal gain. He is also called a "cracker", that is, someone who penetrates or violates the integrity of a remote machine system, with malicious intent).
Both researchers declined to go into detail about how Google monitors such attacks, but said it "identifies the perpetrators who attack our users.".
Recipients of such emails in Google's Gmail service usually receive a warning message.
Security researcher Askan Soltani says in a Twitter post that nine of the 25 largest news websites use Google for their email service.
"The tip of the iceberg"
Several American news organizations have announced that they have been hacked in the past year. For example, the websites of Forbes, the Financial Times, and the New York Times have all been attacked by the Syrian Electronic Army—a group of pro-government hackers.
Hadley said Chinese hackers recently gained access to a major Western news organization, which he did not identify, through a fake questionnaire emailed to employees.
Most such attacks involve sending carefully crafted emails that are accompanied by malware or that direct users to a website where they will be tricked into providing their personal information.
Marqui-Boir says that while such attacks are not a new phenomenon, his research, jointly with Hadley, has shown that the number of attacks against news organizations and journalists that go unreported is significantly higher than those that are made public.
"This is the tip of the iceberg," he says, citing as an example a barrage of attacks on journalists and others working on the human rights situation in Vietnam, including an Associated Press journalist, that lasted a year.
These attacks were usually carried out by sending the target an email with an infected attachment that appeared to be a human rights document.
While many representatives of the world's largest news organizations have been targeted in such attacks, smaller news organizations, citizen journalists and bloggers have also been targeted, says Hadley, citing hacker attacks on journalists in Morocco and Ethiopia.
The problem, Marquis-Boir explains, is that news organizations are slow to recognize the threat and equally slow to take action.
Many journalists are taking individual action to protect their computers and email, he adds.
Source: kathimerini.gr
