A number of the world's top news organizations have been the target of supposed state-sponsored hacking attacks, according to research conducted by Google security engineers.
Twenty-one of the world's top-25 news organizations have been attacked recently, and many of the attacks went unannounced to the public, according to Reuters.
Though thousands of internet users get attacked by hackers everyday via emails created to steal personal information, journalists were "massively over-represented" among such targets, according to Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google.
Some attacks are launched by hackers either working for or in support of a government, and have been specifically targeting journalists lately, Huntley and co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire said, according to Reuters.
Their paper was presented in Singapore at a Black Hat hacker's conference this week.
"If you're a journalist or a journalistic organization 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 said to Reuters.
The researchers did not to go into detail about how Google monitors attacks, but did confirm that it "tracks the state actors that attack our users."
Security researcher Ashkan Soltani said in recent Twitter post that approximately nine of the top-25 news websites use Google for email services, according to Reuters.
The number is based off of traffic volumes measured by web information firm Alexa, which is owned by Amazon.
Google owns VirusTotal, a site designed to analyze other sites and files to check for "malicious content," according to Reuters.
Companies like Forbes, the Financial Times and the New York Times have all been attacked the last year or so by pro-government hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army.
Though these types of attacks are nothing new, Marquis-Boire said their research showed a number of the attacks on journalists and media organizations that went unreported was significantly higher than those made public.
The attacks usually involve sending emails to targets with an infected attachment hidden as a human rights document, according to Reuters.
Attacks aren't just limited to major news organizations however, as smaller news organizations, citizen journalists and bloggers have also been targeted, Huntley said.
The main issue, according to Marquis-Boire, is that that news organizations have been slower than major businesses in recognizing the threat and taking action.
He added that a number of journalists are taking action themselves in order to protect their email accounts and computers
"We're seeing a definite upswing of individual journalists who recognize this is important," said Marquis-Boire.
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