While you were probably out celebrating Christmas, some BBC security staff were no doubt having a rather stressful time, as one of their servers was hacked over the festive period.Reuters broke the story on Sunday, reporting that a Russian hacker who went by the pseudonyms “HASH” and “Rev0lver” secretly took over one of the British broadcaster’s servers and tried to sell access to it on Christmas Day—like a unique, last-minute gift for the hacker who has everything. According to the report, the BBC believed it had successfully secured the site by Saturday, December 28.The hacker was offering administrative access to the file transfer site ftp.bbc.co.uk, and proved his accomplishment by posting a screenshot on a black market forum. The post was noticed by Milwaukee security firm Hold Security LLC. It’s not clear exactly what the Beeb used the server for, or whether the hacker found any buyers or stole any data before their security team responded.The Guardian reported that no price was listed for the server access, though the contents were unlikely to be anything as valuable as something like credit card data. But hacking a corporation as well-known as the BBC would no doubt hold a lot of appeal in the hacker circuit; as Hold Security founder Alex Holden told Reuters, “It's definitely a notch in someone's belt.”While BBC spokespeople refused to comment on the matter, BBC News published its own report on the hack yesterday, and gave a little more insight into what the file-transfer site was used for. They explained that reporters “historically” used the server to file reports, which seems to suggest such material would no longer accessible this way at the time of the hack.“More recently the facility has been used to allow advertisers to send in media files for use on the BBC Worldwide Channels,” they explained, and added that a set of login details was also made public in 2002 to allow readers to upload their own video and audio content for a piece on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.The main risk with this sort of breach is that hackers could use access to the FTP server as a way in to more sensitive parts of the BBC network. “Accessing that server establishes a foothold within BBC's network which may allow an attacker to pivot and gain further access to internal BBC resources," cybersecurity consultant Justin Clark told Reuters.And while hacking a news company might not be as worrying to individuals as, say, someone hacking your bank details, this year in particular has shown how damaging a compromised news site or social media feed can be. Back in April, the Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for a fake tweet from an Associated Press account that falsely claimed there had been explosions in the White House. That threw stock markets into a panic valued at a loss of around $150 billion (albeit temporarily). The same hacktivist group attacked the domains of sites including Twitter, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post in August, and in January the Times also spoke out about ongoing attacks from Chinese hackers.It looks like security should be at the top of news companies’ resolutions for 2014.@VickiTurk
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