The publishing giant Lee Enterprises has confirmed that a cyberettack in its systems is behind the ongoing disorder in dozens of newspapers and media in all the United States.
In an email shared with the customers sent on Friday, which has been seen by TechCrunch, Lee Kevin Mowbray’s CEO said the company worked to “fully restore our systems” after a Cyberettack earlier in the week.
Tracy Rouch, a spokesman for Lee Enterprises, confirmed to TechCrunch that the holidays were caused by an “cyberspace event” and that the company “now focused on identifying information – if any – may have been affected by the situation”.
The spokesman refused to say if he had received any announcement from the hackers or if he had a recovery schedule. The company would not say if it has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if it had access or stolen any information.
Lee does not describe the nature of Cyberettack, nor will the company comment beyond his email.
Lee is one of the largest newspaper publishers in the US and provides publishing technology and sites in 72 publications, including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which broke news about the story on Friday.
The post-dispatch said that while it had not lost any day of publication, most of this week’s newspaper versions were affected. Some newspapers were smaller in a few days, the post-dispatch said.
Several other news stores said they were influenced by Cyberettack in Lee, including Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming. In a news article on his websiteStar-tribune said: “Many of Lee’s newspapers were initially unable to create pages and publish, although the company is working to print and deliver issues.” The newspaper website warns that Cyberettack can “temporarily affect access to subscription accounts”.
According to an email on February 3, sent to all Lee employees, seen by TechCrunch, Lee reported that one of his data centers hosting applications and services used by LEE employees and the media outlets was out of Connection, including its systems for subscriber services.
An email to Lee employees sent later on the same day reported that the call center applications, some telephone lines and other basic systems, including VPN for remote employees and single connection to access applications, were inaccessible.
Holidays have not yet been resolved by Monday. Lee wouldn’t make Ciso Rob Hoffpauir available for an interview.
Lee Enterprises has published its last quarterly profits this week, reporting $ 144.6 million for the first quarter-below 7% annually-but no reference to the interruption or Cyberettack.
This is the second well -known Cyberettack in Lee in the last five years. THE Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 That the Iranian hackers have jeopardized the Lee content management system as part of a campaign aimed at disseminating misinformation before the 2020 presidential election.
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