News Corp was hacked by people who looked like they came from China.
Employees at the New York Post and Wall Street Journal were hacked by Chinese hackers, a cybersecurity expert for the newspapers' parent company said Friday.
Hackers got into the email accounts and documents of a "small number" of News Corp employees, including journalists, the company said. Besides Dow Jones, News Corp. said Friday that its News UK division, which owns both the Times of London and the Sun, was also hacked.
The company said that customer and financial data were not likely to have been hacked.
In January, News Corp found out about the breach and called police. The company also hired a cybersecurity firm called Mandiant to help them with their investigation.
New York Times chief technology officer David Kline and News Corp's chief information security officer Billy O'Brien wrote in an email that "We appear to have been the target of persistent nation-state attack activity that affected a small number of our people." Mandiant thinks that those who are behind this activity have a connection to China and that they are likely spying for China's benefit.
One thing that News Corp did not say was how many employees were hacked by the hack. The company said that it thinks that some parts of the company, like HarperCollins Publishers, News Corp Australia, and Storyful, were not affected.
Journalists Kline and O'Brien say they won't let attacks on their work stop them from reporting the news that matters to everyone.
The news of the breach comes at a time when there has been a big rise in hacking attempts against journalists. Last year, it was said that software from an Israeli company called NSO Group was used to target nearly 200 journalists from news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, and Bloomberg. It was also reportedly linked to the death of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
China, too, has been stepping up its cyber war against the United States, intelligence officials tell us.
On Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the Chinese government had launched a huge, sophisticated hacking program in the United States that was bigger than all of the other major countries' programs put together all at once. As "cyber mercenaries," these people work from almost every major city in China with a lot of money and sophisticated tools. They often work with cyber criminals, making them "cyber warriors."
The U.S. government has blamed China for a huge breach of Microsoft's Exchange email service in 2021. The White House says hackers linked to the Ministry of State Security were able to get into a lot of email accounts for businesses, government offices, and schools all over the world.
News Corp said that other news organizations could get more information about the breach from the company, and that it would.
"We think it's important for other media organizations to know about this threat so that they can take the right steps," Kline and O'Brien wrote in a letter to the Media Information Sharing and Analysis Organization. Kline and O'Brien also sent the technical details of the attack to the organization.
hours later, news broke that the company had a big profit for the last three months. They earned $235 million for the three months ending in December, compared to $231 million the year before. Analysts were expecting $2.64 billion in quarterly revenue, but it came in at $2.72 billion, the Wall Street Journal said. This was more than they expected.
At the start of the day on Friday, News Corp shares were up 0.36 percent at $22.53.