One of the biggest media conglomerates in Portugal, the Impresa group was the target of a hacker attack. Since Sunday morning (2), websites linked to the company have been offline, including the pages of the SIC channel, audience leader in Portuguese open TV, and the newspaper Expresso, the country’s most read weekly.
The ransomware-type offensive — which asks for the payment of a kind of ransom in exchange for the restoration of the system — was claimed by the Lapsus$ Group, the same organization that, in December, assumed responsibility for the attack on the Ministry of Health in Brazil and on the application ConnectSUS.
In a column published in the leaf, specialist Ronaldo Lemos explained that the impact of this type of attack is devastating. According to him, these actions have turned into a professionalized operation, with a “call center” available 24 hours a day for the victim to contact criminals.
The authors of the hacker attack accessed the Portuguese company’s internal system, compromising communication between employees and the operation of tools used to produce television programs, and managed to take down Opto, SIC’s streaming platform.
Hackers even sent messages to the list of subscribers to the newspaper Expresso’s newsletters. On Sunday, several subscribers were fired at a note titled “BREAKING President Away and Charged with Murder,” containing false claims and potentially dangerous links.
According to a report in the Portuguese newspaper Público, there is a suspicion that hackers have accessed the system for several days, studying the best way to carry out a serial attack.
In a statement, the Impresa group classified the action as an “unseen attack on press freedom in Portugal in the digital age” and announced the filing of a criminal complaint about the attack. The company also claims to be in collaboration with the Judiciary Police and the National Cybersecurity Center.
While the sites are down, company journalists have been publishing the content on the group’s social networks. Other Portuguese vehicles, such as Público and Observador newspapers, expressed support for Impresa and have publicized the links to the group’s social networks on their own websites and profiles.
Owner of TVI and CNN Portugal, the Media Capital group released a statement repudiating the attacks, a “concrete threat to the free press” and an “attack on society, which has the right to be informed through independent media and plurals”.
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