- Lee Enterprises confirms suffering
- It was forced to pull parts of its IT infrastructure offline
- Printing of many newspapers was disturbed as a result
American media giant Lee Enterprises has suffered a cyberattack that forced it to pull parts of its IT infrastructure offline – which means dozens of newspapers and media all over the United States couldn’t work normally.
In a new 10-Q form recently submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company said it was suffering a data violation affected operations.
“On February 3, 2025, the company experienced a technology interruption due to a cyber event that affects certain business applications, resulting in an operational disruption,” it was said in the archiving. “The company actively examines the incident, implements recovery measures and assesses the potential influence on its activities, financial conditions and internal controls.”
No essential influence (yet)
Lee Enterprises did not share further details of the attack, nor did it want to discuss it with the media.
Since the company services more than 70 media throughout the states, many were influenced by the attack, Techcrunch Reports. Among them are Post-Dispatch and Casper Star-Tribune. The latter, for example, said “Many of Lee’s newspapers were initially unable to build pages and publish, although the company has worked to print and return problems.”
The publication also received a copy of a letter sent by the company to its employees, stating that a data center that hosted applications and services was offline that drew systems for subscriber services with it.
There is no timeline for improvement yet, but Lee said in the SEC archiving that the attack did not affect the company material. “However, the evaluation remains in progress,” it added.
While not a rule, a company is generally forced to close its IT infrastructure during a ransomware attack. These attacks also often result in data theft and extortion attempts. We expect further details in the coming weeks.
