The Philadelphia Inquirer is experiencing the largest disruption to its operations in 27 years due to what the daily newspaper called a cyberattack that was first detected Saturday morning.
The attack has prompted Pennsylvania’s largest news organization to close its office through at least Tuesday, meaning Inquirer reporters will be unable to use their newsroom on Tuesday night to cover the city’s Democratic primary for the city’s 100th mayoral election.
This incident has caused the greatest publication disruption to the paper since a massive blizzard in January 1996, the paper reported.
The newspaper is working to restore print operations after the apparent cyberattack prevented it from printing its Sunday edition.
The Inquirer’s website was still operational on Sunday, but the paper reported that updates were slower than normal. Online publication has not been interrupted.
The attack was first detected when employees on Saturday morning found the newspaper’s content management system was not working.
The Inquirer “discovered anomalous activity on select computer systems and immediately took those systems off-line,” the paper’s publisher, Lisa Hughes, said in a statement on Saturday.
She said the outlet was “first alerted to the anomalous activity on Thursday, May 11, by Cynet, a vendor that manages our network security.”
This is far from the first time a news outlet has faced a cyberattack. Last December, The Guardian suffered a ransomware attack that forced the British daily newspaper to take certain IT systems offline for weeks.
Hughes said Sunday, “We are currently unable to provide an exact time line” for full restoration of the paper’s systems.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to fully restore systems and complete this investigation as soon as possible,” Hughes said in an email responding to questions from the paper’s newsroom.
Hughes said the operational disruption will not affect coverage of the upcoming election and that the company was looking into co-working arrangements for Tuesday.
The newspaper has hired the risk advisory firm Kroll to restore systems and investigate the incident.
The company has also contacted the FBI about the incident.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Philadelphia office told the Inquirer it was aware of the incident and declined to comment as a matter of standard practice. She said that “when the FBI learns about potential cyberattacks, it’s customary that we offer our assistance in these matters.”
