Washington Post Servers Infiltrated, Employee Credentials Stolen

Newspaper suffers second major breach in three years, Chinese espionage suspected

The Washington Post late today reported that its servers were hacked and employee usernames and passwords were compromised in the attack, which was detected by a contractor that monitors the news organizations network.
Post officials today were alerted by incident response and detection firm Mandiant. Officials at the media organization believe the intrusion may only have been in the works for a few days, although they do not yet have full details on the breadth of the exposed information. Post employees are being urged to change their usernames and passwords, even though those passwords were encrypted.
The news organizations publishing system, email, and employee personal information appear to be safe despite the breach, the
report says
.
A server used by the Posts foreign staff was initially infiltrated, which then led to the breach of other company servers, the report says.
Chinese cyberespionage attackers are considered a likely culprit, especially given the 2011 breach of the Posts network that had the earmarks of a cyberspying mission out of China. That attack appeared to be part of a campaign of targeted attacks against major media outlets, human rights groups, and defense contractors. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were also hit in those attacks.
The Post in August was the target of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacktivist group, which employed a phishing attack
that resulted in a Post staff writers personal Twitter account being hijacked
by the SEA to post its own messages. And some articles from the Posts website were temporarily redirected to the SEAs website.
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Washington Post Servers Infiltrated, Employee Credentials Stolen