While online publishing is mostly unaffected and news stories are still being posted to The Guardian website and app, the employees were being instructed to work from home, as per the reports put forth by The Guardian. 

It has yet not been made clear as to how the breach occurred, whether any company data was stolen or if any threat actor has demanded a ransom payment from the British daily publication. In any general case of a ransomware attack, ransomware groups end up extracting payment in order to restore the victim’s breached files or selling the victim’s sensitive data, or both.  

“As everyone knows, there has been a serious incident which has affected our IT network and systems in the last 24 hours […] We believe this to be a ransomware attack but are continuing to consider all possibilities,” says Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, Anna Bateson, and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner. 

“We are continuing to publish globally to our website and apps and although some of our internal systems are affected, we are confident we will be able to publish in print tomorrow. Our technology teams have been working to deal with all aspects of this incident, with the vast majority of our staff able to work from home as we did during the pandemic.” 

While the publication plans on sharing further information in regard to the attack, it ensures that this would not affect the newspaper production, scheduled for Thursday. 

Ransomware has emerged as a serious threat all across the business world, with nearly 92 percent of global organizations witnessing at least one email-based ransomware in the year 2022, shows a recent study by cybersecurity company, Tussian. 

In addition to this, 10 percent of the security giants say that they have reported over 450 email-based ransomware attacks since January 2022. While 72 percent reported having experienced account compromise and takeover attempts in the year 2022.