Wall Street Journal Parent Company, and Dow Jones & Co. Hacked, Exposing Subscriber Details

It's another day, and there has been another hacker attack on a major online publication. If a hacker group isn't busy counting their money, they are seeking out a new target, which happened to be the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Co. recently.

Dow Jones, a News Corp subsidiary, is claiming that between a three year period an attacker illegally gained access to one of its servers that could have exposed data for 3,500 of its subscribers. The data that may have been compromised includes names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and potentially credit card information for both current and former Dow Jones subscribers.

The data breach, which was just reported back in July of 2015 by US law officials, resulted in the Dow Jones company sending letters to notify its affected subscribers. While the full details of the attack are not clear, the letter notifying those affected claims that the hacker attack is part of a bigger campaign that also targeted similar publications.

Security researchers and law enforcement believe that the initial reasons for the hacker attack against publications like the Wall Street Journal's parent company is to obtain customer contact data so they may send unsolicited emails to carry out other attacks.

The idea of obtaining simple details is not what concerns officials. It's the idea that credit card data could have been compromised in the recent attack thus putting the 3,500 affected individuals not only at risk of identity theft but risk credit card fraud or theft of their money. As the investigation into the matter continues, so far no hard evidence has been overturned to lead them to conclude that credit card data was part of the attack's uncovered data.

Data breaches nowadays are nearly as common as the flu; someone is bound to get hit with it, and the only thing we can do is take preventative measures to help protect ourselves. The same can be said about publishing companies over the internet when it comes to safeguarding their data.