The researchers have presented their findings at Black Hat in Singapore

Mar 28, 2014 15:06 GMT  ·  By

At the Black Hat conference in Singapore, a couple of security engineers from Google have revealed that 21 of the world’s top 25 news organizations have been targeted by hackers.

Shane Huntley and Morgan Marquis-Boire say the attackers are either working for governments or they’re sponsored by one, Reuters reports. The hackers are said to be targeting both journalists and the organizations they work for.

However, not only major companies are targeted. Bloggers and citizen journalists are also often attacked.

The experts have declined to provide too many details on how Google is tracking these attacks, but they’ve revealed that the search engine giant tracks the state actors that attack its customers. It’s well known that users whose accounts are believed to be targeted by state-sponsored entities are warned when they access their Gmail accounts.

“A lot of news organisations are just waking up to this,” noted Marquis-Boire. “We're seeing a definite upswing of individual journalists who recognise this is important.”

One perfect example of state-sponsored hackers targeting a news organization is the attack (allegedly) launched by Chinese hackers against the New York Times in October 2012, shortly after the company posted an article on the family riches of the country’s prime minister.