HEILBRONN (BADEN-WURTEMBERTG, GERMANY), Oct. 16 (DPA/EP) –
The German daily ‘Heilbronner Stimme’ has been forced to cancel Monday’s paper edition due to a computer attack, its editor-in-chief, Uwe Ralf Heer, has confirmed to DPA.
The newspaper is already working on a 24-page digital edition that will be available free of charge on Monday. It is not clear when the printed newspaper will come out again.
Several systems of the Stimme media group were encrypted Friday night during a hack. The company has reported that it has received a letter from the alleged perpetrators, which points to an extortion attempt. It appears to be a known group of cyber criminals.
Heer noted that the IT department and external IT experts have been able to create a parallel production environment in a very short time. “For me it’s a miracle,” he noted. If all goes according to plan, employees will be able to continue working in a new digital environment.
The ‘Heilbronner Stimme’ was able to hit the streets on Saturday with an emergency edition. The stimme.de website was still available at the weekend with updated news. Heer said that at first the journalists worked from their private computers, from home, but now they are all in the newsroom.
Normally, according to the company, the newspapers ‘Heilbronner Stimme’, ‘Hohenloher Zeitung’ and ‘Kraichgau Stimme’ have a circulation of 75,000 copies. Also part of the Stimme group are the companies Pressedruck, Echo and RegioMail, which according to the information were also affected by the attack.
The German media have been subjected to cyberattacks with increasing frequency in recent years. Some of them paralyzed the production of newspapers for weeks.
