Google: almost all major news sites suffer from state hack attacks

Google states that servers of news organizations and accounts of journalists are a primary target of hackers working on behalf of states. For example, 21 of the 25 largest news organizations are said to have been attacked by hackers working for governments.

The findings were published at a Black Hat meeting in Singapore by Shane Huntley and Morgan Marquis-Boire, both security researchers at Google. Investigations have shown that both journalists and bloggers are being attacked by hackers hired by governments or even employed by states, Reuters reports.

While Google won’t reveal the exact method of how they get the numbers, security researcher Ashkan Soltani . lets know that 9 of the 25 most popular websites, using Alexa’s ranking, are hosted by Google.

According to Marquis-Boire, it is common knowledge that the media as well as webloggers are primary targets of hackers working on behalf of countries, but that many attacks on news sites never make the news. In addition, many publishers have only recently started taking measures to reduce the risk of successful hacking attacks.