The website of one of Portugal’s biggest newspapers and a major broadcaster owned by the country’s largest media conglomerate Impressa was down on Monday following a hacker attack over the weekend.
Both the Expresso newspaper and the SIC TV station said that they reported the incident to the criminal investigation police agency PJ and the National Cyber Security Center (CNCS) and they would file a complaint.
The alleged hackers, describing themselves as Lapsus$Group, published a message on websites stating that internal data would be leaked if the media group failed to pay the ransom. The message included e-mail and Telegram contact information.
The group did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Lapsus$, which claims it gained access to Impressa’s Amazon Web Services account, also sent a phishing e-mail to Expresso customers and tweeted from the newspaper’s verified Twitter account.
The same group allegedly hacked the website of Brazil’s health ministry last month, taking down several systems, one containing information about a national immunization program and another issuing digital vaccination certificates.
The coordinator of the CNCS, Lino Santos, told the Observador newspaper that this was the first time the group had attacked the country.
The websites of Expresso and SIC have been offline since Sunday, with a message showing they are “temporarily unavailable” after the attack and will be back “as soon as possible”.
Meanwhile, both the media organizations are publishing the news on their social media channels. He described it as an “unprecedented attack on press freedom in the digital age”.
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