Google claims 80% of news outlets are targeted by state-sponsored hackers
Google has published new research finding as much as 80 per cent of major news outlets are subjected to attacks from state-sponsored hackers.
The findings come from two Google engineers who presented their results to the Black Hat Asia 2014 conference in Singapore, which found that journalists are ‘massively over-represented’ when it comes to being targeted by state-sponsored hackers.
Shane Huntley and Morgan Marquis-Boire confirmed that they actively track the state actor’s attack its users, issuing a warning to those it believes have been subjected to such activities on their webmail login.
The Guardian has revealed that it is one of the news organisations targeted by such messages, which read: “Warning: We believe that attackers backed by certain states may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now.”
Speaking to Reuters Huntley said: “if you're a journalist or a journalistic organisation we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from."
Favoured methods of attack include emails with malicious attachments, illicit software downloads and links to websites which steal passwords or other personal information.