Submit-ransomware assault, The Guardian warns workers their private knowledge was accessed • Graham Cluley

Only a few days earlier than Christmas, I broke information that The Guardian newspaper had suffered what turned out to be a ransomware assault, forcing workers to do business from home.

I have been instructed that @guardian has suffered a “critical IT incident” which is affecting entry to all its places of work.

Workers are being instructed to do business from home, and to not use VPN to log in to any techniques… 🙁

Wishing the Guardian IT workforce nicely, particularly presently of yr. pic.twitter.com/d31YOkmwoY

— Graham Cluley 🇺🇦 (@gcluley) December 21, 2022

Three weeks have now handed, and though the revered UK newspaper has continued to be revealed and its web site remained on-line all through, there isn’t simply excellent news to report.

Yesterday, workers on the 200-year-old information organisation had been despatched an electronic mail that warned them that the continuing investigation into the assault had uncovered that hackers had gained entry to information containing workers’s private data.

In keeping with the e-mail, knowledge accessed consists of:

• names
• addresses
• dates of start
• Nationwide Insurance coverage numbers
• checking account particulars
• wage data
• and id paperwork resembling passports.

Yeuch.

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The Guardian knowledgeable its workers that it had “had seen no proof that private knowledge has been uncovered on-line, and so the danger is low. We’re persevering with to watch for this.”

We realise this information could also be very worrying for everybody, and we wish to say how sorry we’re for any nervousness this may occasionally now trigger. However now that we’ve got confirmed there’s a danger, we’ll do the whole lot we will to help workers…

The Guardian contacted the Data Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) earlier this month to report the incident. Organisations are required to inform the ICO of any knowledge breaches inside 72 hours of turning into conscious of it.

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