After being hacked over the weekend, the websites of one of Portugal’s leading newspapers and a major broadcaster, both owned by the country’s largest media giant Impresa, were down on Monday.
Both the Expresso newspaper and the SIC television station claimed they had reported the incident to the PJ criminal investigation police agency and the National Cybersecurity Centre (CNCS), and that they planned to submit a complaint.
The alleged hackers, who go by the name Lapsus$ Group, posted a message on the websites threatening to reveal internal data unless the media company paid a ransom. E-mail and Telegram contact information was supplied in the message. Lapsus$ also sent a phishing e-mail to Expresso subscribers and tweeted using the newspaper’s official Twitter account, claiming to have gotten access to Impresa’s Amazon Web Services account.
Last month, the same organization allegedly attacked Brazil’s health ministry website, shutting down multiple systems, including one that contained information about the country’s immunization program and another that issued digital vaccination certificates.
Lino Santos, the CNCS’s coordinator, informed the Observador newspaper that this was the group’s first attack in the country.
Expresso and SIC’s websites have been down since Sunday, with a statement stating that they are “temporarily unavailable” as a result of the attack and that they will be back “as soon as possible.”
In the meanwhile, both media outlets are sharing news stories on their social media platforms. It was an “unprecedented attack on press freedom in the digital age,” they said.
