The Philadelphia Inquirer is working to restore systems impacted by what was described as a cyberattack that hit its network over the weekend.

The attack has also disrupted operations, with newspaper circulation coming to a halt while Inquirer.com is only slightly affected, with publishing and updating of articles affected by intermittent delays.

“The incident was the biggest disruption to publications by Pennsylvania’s largest news agency since the January 7-8 blizzard, 1996, and it happened just days before Tuesday’s mayoral primary election.” , said Jonathan Lai of the Inquirer. said.

“We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to fully restore systems and complete this investigation as soon as possible,” said a spokeswoman for Inquirer’s publisher Lisa Hughes.

“We will keep our employees and readers informed as we learn more.”

The news agency detected the attack after the content management system crashed on Saturday morning, days after being alerted to ‘abnormal activity’ by Cynet Systems, a cybersecurity company that handles security for the Inquirer network. .

After the incident was detected, the editor of the Inquirer said the newspaper had taken down some computer systems due to “abnormal activity”.

The regular Sunday edition could not be printed after the attack and was only published online as an electronic edition.

While the Monday editions were to be printed and distributed to subscribers, some classified ads will be delayed “out of caution”.

Log to notify potentially affected subscribers

The Inquirer also notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation and engaged Kroll’s services to investigate and respond to the cyber incident.

Hughes could not provide information on the identity of the attackers and whether they had access to sensitive customer or employee information, but said the newspaper would notify those who may have had their data affected during the attack. ‘incident.

The Philadelphia Inquirer now reaches a growing audience of more than 13 million people a month through its newspaper, website and other platforms, nearly 200 years after it was first published in 1829.

News Corporation, a media and publishing giant that owns the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, MarketWatch, Fox News, Barron’s, The Sun and News UK, also disclosed February 2023 that attackers linked to China had access to its network between February 2020 and January 2022.

The threat actors had access to an email and document storage system used by several News Corp companies, which gave them access to business documents and emails containing sensitive data, including personal information employees.

In 2022, a compromised video and advertising content provider was used to push malware through the sites of hundreds of newspapers across the United States, while dozens of US news sites were hacked by the Evil Corp gang to infect employees of Fortune 500 companies with malware.