A hacker has offered to sell some databases of news sites belonging to the Wall Street Journal and Vice for two bitcoins, currently about $1,246.
A hacker, or a group of hackers, claimed responsibility for the intrusions and posted proof of the compromise on Twitter, in the form of screenshots of Vice and Wall Street Journal databases. The hacker has been identified as "w0rm."
IntelCrawler, a Los Angeles-based security firm, alerted the Journal to the intrusion, shortly after Vice had taken its own hit from the hacker. The intrusion exposed a vulnerability in the Wall Street Journal's graphics database, which contained maps.
"We confirmed there is the opportunity to get access to any database on the wsj.com server, a list of over 20 databases hosted on this server," said IntelCrawler CEO Andrew Komarov.
Komarov said the hacker has been motivated by the sale of databases owned by large brands with high user counts. The stolen information would then be sold via the hacker's online marketplace to spammers, malware distributors and other hackers.
Some of the Wall Street Journal's servers were said by a spokeswoman to have been taken down in response to the intrusion, as the news organization looks into the matter. The news organization reported that there was no evidence of tampering concerning its graphics.
"We are investigating an incident related to wsj.com's graphics systems. At this point we see no evidence of any impact to Dow Jones customers or customer data," said the spokeswoman.
Before the intrusion into its databases, the Wall Street Journal's Facebook page was compromised by w0rm on July 20 and the hacker hijacked some of MSNBC's links.
On July 14, w0rm notified CNET via Twitter that it had hacked into the tech news site and intended to sell the database information for a single bitcoin, about $621 based on today's currency exchange rate, to draw attention to the itself. The affected database was said to contain usernames, emails and passwords.
"[W]e are driven to make the Internet a better and safer [place] rather than a desire to protect copyright," w0rm stated. "I want to note that the experts responsible for bezopastnost [security] in cnet very good work but not without flaws."
Erik Cabetas, managing partner at Include Security, believes hacking attacks at news organizations would trend upward and said he doubted the intrusions would be contained any time soon.
"I'd like to pretend that there is some quick prescriptive advice for media companies to stop getting hacked, but there isn't," said Cabetas. "It's a pervasive problem that affects all major media outlets, and this situation won't change short of sweeping changes to the way risk is managed in media companies."
