Washington Post breached twice now in three years

The Washington Post’s web servers have been breached for the 2nd time in three years, giving hackers entry to staff usernames and passwords, the news site revealed Wednesday.

No subscriber details or the newspaper’s posting system were thought to have been accessed from the breach, in which the company thinks it originated from China mainly because it started with a host utilized by the newspaper’s foreign staff. The newspaper said there is solid evidence Chinese hackers were behind a 2011 hack of the newspaper’s job-seeker database, in combination with recent network breaches at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“This is an ongoing investigation, but we believe it was a few days at most,” spokeswoman Kris Coratti stated.

Even though the level of the information accessed wasn’t instantly clear and passwords are hashed, the news source was recommending that every one of its employees change their usernames and passwords.

The first breach occured in June 2011, around 1.27 million usernames and e-mail addresses of individuals searching for work on The Washington Post Jobs Site had been accessed in a data breach, however the company said no passwords or any other private information were impacted.