Day by day newspaper Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that attackers behind a Could 2023 safety breach have stolen the private and monetary data of 25,549 people.
The Inquirer is Philadelphia’s largest newspaper by circulation and has received 20 Pulitzer Prizes because it was based in 1829. It is also the third-longest working every day newspaper in america.
In Could 2023, The Inquirer disclosed that its methods had been breached in a cyberattack detected after its content material administration system went down unexpectedly. In response, the information organizations took some pc methods offline to comprise the safety breach and employed Kroll forensics specialists to research the “anomalous activity.”
The assault disrupted the publication of the print newspaper, with home-delivery subscribers requested to meet up with the newest information utilizing the newspaper’s web site (inquirer.com), which remained unaffected.
“On May 13, 2023, we became aware of suspicious activity relating to certain internal information systems. In response, we began working with third-party cyber specialists to investigate the nature and scope of the activity,” The Inquirer stated in knowledge breach notifications [PDF] despatched to impacted people.
“We determined that an unauthorized party gained access to our systems and certain files were viewed and/or copied from our systems between May 11, 2023, and May 13, 2023.”
The investigation decided that the knowledge uncovered through the breach included the impacted people’ names and different private identifiers together with monetary account numbers or credit score/debit card numbers (together with safety code, entry code, password, or PIN for the accounts).
The newspaper suggested affected individuals to observe their accounts for id theft and fraud makes an attempt and supplied 24 months of free Experian credit score monitoring and id restoration providers.
Whereas The Inquirer did not reveal the character of the assault, the Cuba ransomware gang claimed accountability one week after the incident.
The ransomware group claimed they stole monetary paperwork, correspondence with financial institution workers, steadiness sheets, tax paperwork, compensation, and supply code from Inquirer’s compromised servers.
Cuba additionally printed the recordsdata on its darkish internet leak web site, indicating that the newspaper refused to pay a ransom and that the extortion try reached a lifeless finish.
Nevertheless, in the future after the recordsdata had been leaked, The Inquirer reported that the paperwork didn’t “appear to come from the newspaper.” Quickly after, the ransomware gang eliminated the Philadelphia Inquirer entry from its web site.
Because the FBI and CISA revealed in a joint safety advisory, the Cuba ransomware gang collected over $60 million in ransoms till August 2022 after breaching greater than 100 victims worldwide.
A earlier FBI advisory from December 2021 additionally warned that Cuba operators had compromised no less than 49 U.S. vital infrastructure organizations.
