Twenty-one of the world’s top-25 news organisations have been infiltrated by state-sponsored hackers, according to a report.
Reuters reported the findings of Google security engineers Shane Huntley and Morgan Marquis-Boire
According to Huntley journalists were “massively over-represented” among targets of hackers.
The Google employees said journalists were specifically targeted, at times by government bodies.
“If you’re a journalist or a journalistic organisation we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from,” Huntley told Reuters.
HumanIPO has reported a number of hacking incidents targeting media institutions over the past year.
In August last year, pro-Assad hackers, the Syrian Electonic Army (SEA), infiltrated the websites of Time, the Washington Post and CNN. The hack resulted in the New York Times taking its website offline.
The group then attacked CNN for the second time at the beginning of the year, accusing the media giant of falsifying news.
Earlier this month the Ethiopian government was accused of using foreign technology to spy on opposition figures and journalists.
“The Ethiopian government is using control of its telecom system as a tool to silence dissenting voices,” said Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
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