Journalists may handle sensitive sources, investigate cyber incidents, and face risks involving surveillance, phishing, and data exposure.
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Background for this topic.
Journalists gather, verify, and publish information, often handling unpublished documents, confidential source identities, and sensitive communications. Their security relevance is concentrated in protecting source confidentiality, editorial materials, accounts, and personal safety from targeted phishing, account takeover, device compromise, surveillance, or theft of stored data.
Useful controls include phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, prompt patching, encrypted communications and storage, strong separation between personal and reporting accounts, and careful handling of identifying metadata such as file histories and location data. Security planning should also cover source verification, secure transfer and deletion procedures, device and travel risks, and a response plan to revoke sessions, preserve evidence, assess exposed sources, and communicate through trusted channels after a suspected compromise.
An unnamed customer of Paragon's Graphite product used the commercial spyware to target at least two prominent European journalists in recent months.
Journalists' Microsoft accounts were breached, which would have given attackers access to emails of staff reporters covering national security, economic policy, and China.
Suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers reportedly targeted the Washington Post journalists covering national security and economic policy, according to an internal memo and media reports. The publication has not disclosed the identity of victims.
Email accounts of several Washington Post journalists were compromised in a cyberattack believed to have been carried out by a foreign government. [...]