Of the breach reported by Bloomberg, Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Kelly Langmesser told Reuters via email, “We are aware of the Dow Jones intrusion and looking into it”. “We are looking into whether there is any truth whatsoever to this report by a competitor news organization”, Dow Jones says in a statement released to CNBC.
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Dow Jones originally said publicly, last week, that hackers had only managed to get away with contact information on about 3,500 of their customers.
Dow Jones, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owns the Wall Street Journal, among other financial publications.
Bloomberg said it is unclear if the incursions are related, as this intrusion involves hackers seeking information on stories being prepared for publication. Today’s reported incident involved the newsgathering operations of the Wall Street journal and could have pertained to non-public embargoed information withheld from the public until an agreed upon release date.
Colleen Schwartz, a spokeswoman for Dow Jones, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
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There was a time when closely held information was secret and was only passed from hand to hand. The incident was said to be “far more serious” than a data breach disclosed by Dow Jones a week ago, according to the Bloomberg report. The hackers’ intent was to steal data for trading purposes, according to the sources. The company said it had no direct evidence that information was stolen. They said these Russian-speaking hackers working from Ukraine reaped more than $100 million in gains by trading on unreleased earnings reports from companies like Oracle, Caterpillar and Boeing.
