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Watertown Times attacked by malware

Apr 30, 2019 1:00 pm
WWNY-TV, the Fox affiliate that serves Watertown, Jefferson County, is reporting The Watertown Times was the victim of a cyber-attack over the weekend. As a result, most of the paper's Sunday edition was not printed and distributed. Managing editor Alec Johnson said the paper's information technology staff discovered April 27, "servers and computers had been infiltrated by a malware virus that encrypted files." Based on the newspaper's reporting, it was not immediately clear early on how extensive the computer damage may have been. Malware like the kind that struck The Watertown Times typically threatens to encrypt files if a ransom is not paid. In late 2018, Ryuk ransomware spread across major U.S. publications, and delayed the printing of the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and West Coast editions of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The Watertown Times is the flagship paper of the Johnson Newspaper Corporation, which owns daily newspapers across upstate New York, including he Register-Star of Hudson, and the Daily Mail of Catskill. Read the full story at WWNYTV [dot] com.