The media giant from the United States (US), News Corp., is investigating a cyber attack that managed to access the emails and documents of its employees and journalists.
New York-based News Corp whose entities include The Wall Street Journal and New York Poston Friday (4/2), sent an internal email to its staff, saying they had been the target of “continuous state-sponsored attack activity.”
“On January 20, News Corp discovered an attack on a system used by several of our business units,” David Kline, News Corp’s chief technology officer, wrote in an email.
News Corp said as soon as the attack was traced it alerted law enforcement and launched an investigation with help from Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm.
The attack has affected “a number of email accounts and documents” from News Corp’s headquarters as well as units of News Technology Services, Dow Jones, News UK and New York Post.
Preliminary analysis suggests foreign government involvement may be linked to this activity, and some data has been retrieved,” Kline wrote. “We will not tolerate attacks on our journalism, and will not flinch and continue to do our reporting work.”
“Mandiant concludes that those behind this activity have ties to China, and we believe they may be engaging in espionage activities to gather intelligence that is beneficial to China’s interests,” said Dave Wong, vice president and incident responder at Mandiant. in an email sent to VOA.
Wong’s suspicions are similar to those of human rights groups who are also facing an increase in cyberattacks originating from foreign governments, which they suspect have links to China.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the US, told VOA in an email on Friday that rather than making allegations based on speculation, he hoped there would be a “professional, responsible and evidence-based approach” to identifying these cyberattacks. [jm/my]