Ottawa student newspaper website erased in ‘scary’ cyberattack
An Ottawa student newspaper will be able to retrieve thousands of articles from its website after an apparent hacker erased all its content over the long weekend.
Journalists with The Fulcrum, one of two student publications at the University of Ottawa, were stunned to find their WordPress website blank on Saturday with only one article. A photo of a man giving the middle finger topped the lone story, which featured a headline calling the newspaper an “anti-union rag.” The byline read “She Who Must Not be Named.”
More than 3,000 articles on the site and archived appeared to be gone, some more than a decade old.
“It was definitely scary,” said editor in chief Matt Gergyek, adding that the paper has been careful not to jump to conclusions about the motives behind the cyberattack without identifying a hacker. “If this was caused by a conflict I think there’s way better ways to address that than to hack a website and erase the tireless work of so many generations of journalists.”
The student journalists filed a report with the Ottawa police and are looking into working with the RCMP or other agencies regarding the cyberattack. The newspaper has updated its security features and managed to restore the articles from a backup.
The cyberattack comes amid a tumultuous year for students at the school. A February referendum saw undergraduate students overwhelmingly support a shift in representation to the Students’ Union after allegations of fraud surfaced around management of the Student Federation.
If the incident was inspired by the paper’s coverage of student controversy, it wouldn’t be the first time the Fulcrum faced criticism, said former editor in chief Anchal Sharma.
“We’ve had some criticism in the past from people who maybe didn’t like everything that we were publishing or who were criticizing the publication itself, but we never thought it would come to something like this,” she said. “In future if they have a problem with somebody reporting on a news story they don’t like, send a letter to the editor.”
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