Hackers hit Washington Post for second time in three years
Employee usernames and passwords were accessed in latest hack, which the company suspected of originating in China.
The Washington Post's servers have been breached for the second time in three years, giving hackers access to employee usernames and passwords, the company revealed Wednesday.
Neither personal subscriber information nor the newspaper's publishing system were believed to have been accessed in the intrusion, which the company suspects originated in China because it began on a server used by the newspaper's foreign staff. The newspaper said there was strong evidence Chinese hackers were behind a 2011 hack of the newspaper's job-seeker data base, as well as recent months-long network breaches at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
"This is an ongoing investigation, but we believe it was a few days at most," Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti told the newspaper.
Although the extent of the data lost was not immediately clear and passwords are stored in encrypted form, the company was recommending that all of its employees change their usernames and passwords.
In June 2011, about 1.27 million usernames and e-mail addresses belonging to people looking for employment on The Washington Post Jobs Web site were accessed during a data breach, but the company said no passwords or other personal information were affected.
[Via The Verge]