Lee Enterprises, one of many largest newspaper teams in america, says a cyberattack that hit its programs precipitated an outage final week and impacted its operations.
In a Friday submitting with the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee (SEC), the corporate mentioned the February 3 cyberattack was behind the outage that impacted its enterprise operations.
“On February 3, 2025, the Firm skilled a know-how outage because of a cyber incident affecting sure enterprise purposes, leading to an operational disruption,” Lee Enterprises revealed.
“We are actually targeted on figuring out what data – if any – could have been affected by the scenario,” a Lee Enterprises spokesperson informed BleepingComputer.
“We’re working to finish this investigation as shortly and totally as doable, however these kinds of investigations are complicated and time-consuming, with many taking a number of weeks or longer to finish. We have now notified legislation enforcement of the scenario.”
Lee Enterprises newsrooms have reported that the cyberattack pressured the corporate to close down lots of its networks, disrupting the printing and supply of dozens of newspapers.
BleepingComputer has additionally realized that the ensuing outage has precipitated chaos throughout the newspaper group, with VPNs used to attach securely to the community not working and reporters and editors unable to entry their recordsdata.
Because the assault, a number of Lee Enterprises publications have displayed banners on the prime of their web sites that learn, “We’re at present present process upkeep on some companies, which can quickly have an effect on entry to subscription accounts and the E-edition. We apologize for any inconvenience and admire your endurance as we work to resolve the problems.”
“We can’t speculate on particulars that stay below investigation, and we will be unable to share data that would compromise our investigation or any investigation by legislation enforcement,” BleepingComputer was additionally informed.
The native information supplier publishes 77 day by day newspapers and 350 weekly and specialty publications in 26 states. Its newspapers have a day by day circulation of over 1.2 million, and digital editions attain greater than 44 million distinctive guests.
Its portfolio contains the Buffalo Information in New York, the Richmond Occasions-Dispatch in Virginia, the Arizona Each day Star, the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska, the Press of Atlantic Metropolis, the St. Louis Publish-Dispatch in Missouri, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, and dozens of different media retailers.
Lee Enterprises was hit by one other cyberattack 5 years in the past, earlier than the 2020 U.S. presidential election, when Iranian hackers breached its community as a part of a broader marketing campaign to unfold disinformation.
