Hackers brought down the websites of principal Swedish Newspapers

The online editions of principal Swedish newspapers were knocked out for several hours by a cyber attack during the weekend.

The websites if a Swedish were shut down in the weekend due to an “extremely dangerous and serious” cyber attack.

The websites hit by the hackers are the Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet, Dagens Industri, Sydsvenskan and Helsingborgs Dagblad.  The website went down on Saturday evening from about 19:00 GMT until about 22:00 GMT.

The news was confirmed by the head of the Swedish Media Publishers’ Association, Jeanette Gustafsdotter, in an interview with the Swedish news agency TT.

“To threaten access to news coverage is a threat to democracy,” she said.

At the time I was writing no one has claimed responsibility for the cyber attack and there are no details about the attacks. Experts speculate that threat actors coordinated a distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attacks against the websites of the Swedish media agencies.

Immediately before the attacks a Twitter account posted the following messages:

“The following days attacks against the Swedish government and media spreading false propaganda will be targeted”  tweeted @_notJ.

“This is what happends when you spread false propaganda. Aftonbladet.se #offline @Aftonbladet” states another Tweet.

The Swedish Police and the intelligence are investigating the case. According to several sources on the Internet, the attacks originated from Russia.

Stay Tuned.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Swedish Newspapers, hacking)