Washington Post Servers Hacked Again

The Washington Post is a major print newspaper that was purchased by Amazon's Jeff Bezos last summer. The paper also has a digital arm with servers that were hacked a few times in the past. The last time the servers were hacked came in February of this year.

Servers at the Washington Post have now been hacked again making the third time in three years that the newspaper's servers have been breached. This time reports indicate that the intruders gained access by using employee usernames and passwords. Security workers at the paper don't know how significant the loss of data is at this point.

The intrusion was reportedly discovered by an outside security consultant firm called Mandiant. That security service reported the breach yesterday. Among the data known to have been compromised are employee user names and passwords that were stored in encrypted form.

Officials at the paper are assuming that the passwords can be cracked and have told employees to change their passwords. Officials say that there is no sign that the subscriber information has been touched. That subscriber information includes credit card data and home addresses. There is also no indication that the publishing system of the paper, employee email database, or personal information of workers was touched by the hackers.

SOURCE: ArsTechnica