RADIO broadcast jamming, the aerial bombing of radio stations and their transmission antennas and the acts of sabotage against radio infrastructures and newspaper premises were frequent events of World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Engineers had to find out ways to hastily equip new buildings to serve as broadcasting studios and how to camouflage replaced antennas so as to protect them against renewed bombing; and they also learned how to arrange alternative frequencies to outmaneuver jamming operations. The early years of satellite TV broadcasting were mostly safe but that did not last for long, with some such broadcasts becoming target of beam jamming in the 2000s. In the world of today, the targeting of media and news distribution outlets continues but with a new look that is produced and edited by the technology in use. Such targeting may be effected as part of a larger or an all-out attack as so was the case with Estonia 2007 or specifically against one particular service. In the Estonia 2007 case, the country's government offices, ministries, banks, parliament and media and broadcasting services were all incapacitated in one and the same digital strike. A smaller-scale cyber-attack would have as a target a certain group of similar facilities such as banks and business corporations. An example of that latter form was the cyber-attack against Gulf oil companies in October last year. The exclusive targeting of media and news services remains the commonest ‘fashion' of our time, mostly taking one or more of five principal shapes; namely, service denial, data theft, network user access disruption, front-page control and content falsification. My definition apparently excludes such individual offences as illegal access to paid services, identity theft and the manipulation of illegally accessed data for purposes to which the hacker or attackers is not entitled. The reason for excluding these offences is that law enforcement agencies in almost all countries of the world can track the perpetrators and send them to courts. That is not the case of cross-border digital attacks, as hackers are usually sophisticated and highly professional, disguising their identities and faking the point of origin. The latest cyber-attack broke out just the other day, targeting this time the micro-blogging service Twitter, a global platform for social networking that involves the instantaneous dissemination of views and information. Compromising the passwords of some 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users and opening users' info to hackers, the attack was, in the words of Twitter's Information Security Director Bob Lord, sophisticated and similar to ones suffered recently by other American media and technology companies including The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Five days earlier, The New York Times reported that its computer systems had for four months been the target of a cyber-infiltration and that the intruders had gotten away with the passwords for its reporters and other employees (http://v.gd/iduqut). A computer security firm hired by NYT reportedly tracked the attack to Chinese hackers, a conclusion that was dismissed by Beijing as unprofessional and baseless. The NYT and Twitter cases dramatise both the tug-of-war game that has been on the go for quite some time between news organisations and hackers and the grim outlook for a future laden with the risks of such organisations turned into fragile target in wars or in less intense conflicts or even in business rivalries. As it unfolded, the NYT case provided much food for thought, not only for cyber-security circles but also, and even more significantly, for media scholars. Viewed in a broader context, this and other qualitatively similar incidents that have taken place all across the world tend to suggest that less hi-tech-dependent newspapers and news services are less prone to digital intrusions and other forms of cyber-attacks. It is a paradox. While news organisations and media corporations need internet-based software and applications to update their operations and deliver market-standard or even more advanced services, they do simultaneously face a risk of compromising their data, opening their intranets to potentially harmful and unauthorised access. But no end purpose of digital intrusions into news organisations looks identifiable other than getting to know how to fully or partially disrupt the discharge of a news service. And here is the source of real menace simply because it is digital attackers who can decide when to attempt to knock a news service out of action given that, as a pattern, they have always been on the watch-out for techniques to outsmart additional security measures initiated by news organisations by way of guarding their systems and networks against previously discovered bugs. Furthermore, tracking the virtual raiders could be both stressful and futile, given that they operate under fake digital profiles and that they keep changing their digital identities. In the NYT case as well as in many previous cases elsewhere, the security damage was duly assessed and controlled. But it takes money, time and effort which could otherwise have been channeled to some other rewarding ends. Consider, to cite just one example, that the NYT had to stay on digital vigil for four full months so that it could ‘identify every digital back door the hackers used' following which time it had to replace “every compromised computer and set up new defences in hopes of keeping hackers out". At the heart of the paradox lies the issue of motivation that drives hackers to target news organisations and media corporations. Hackers seek money gains by playing havoc with bank accounts and credit cards. They compromise the national security of states by accessing sensitive information in key departments. They intimidate and degrade the public image of celebs by divulging their very private correspondences, tribulations, romances and affairs. In the case of news and media organisations, however, the motivations of digital raiders are not only many and varied but also wrapped in some extent of ambiguity or suspicion. Whichever information saved by these organisations is mainly meant for dissemination in print, over terrestrial and satellite frequencies, over broadband services or via SMNs. And most such services deliver their output or are now making it digitally available 24/7. In other words, the largest portion of the content saved by media organisations is by no means classified except in the case of information gathered for a scoop news story. And even in that latter case, the information would be ultimately made public. It appears therefore that content theft in news organisation intrusions may not be the grand prix for hackers and attackers. Rather, it is most likely the partial or total disruption of the news production cycle if and when need be. It is the knocking off of studios and antennas by other means. And it is even more disastrous now that the twin news production and consumption cycles have become an inseparable ingredient of the lives of men and women the world over.
