Cyber Incident Victim: Altaposten

On Tuesday morning employees of Altaposten arrived for work unaware that a data attack had disabled one of the newspaper’s servers. The attack was detected later that morning, prompting the shutdown of additional systems as a security precaution. As a result, the production of both the paper edition and the electronic edition of Altaposten was halted. The disruption also forced the cancellation of Radio Alta’s broadcast and affected the Sami newspaper Avvir, which had to abandon its paper edition for the day.

In response, local and external IT experts began working immediately to limit the damage caused by the intrusion. Editor Rolf Edmund expressed regret over the inability to publish the paper edition and confirmed that the incident would be reported to the police and routinely notified to the Data Protection Authority. Initial assessments indicated that the consequences were limited to local operations, with the newspaper’s online platform remaining fully accessible. Despite the outage, Altaposten.no continued to function normally, and the evening bingo broadcast on Radio Alta was expected to proceed as scheduled. To compensate readers for the missing paper issue, the editorial team decided to make most of the articles published that day available free of charge.

The failure to produce a paper edition marked the first time in 51 years that Altaposten had missed its print run, a fact highlighted by typographer Trond Romsdal. The incident also meant that Avvir’s paper edition was omitted for Tuesday, underscoring the broader impact of the attack on regional media. While the paper version was unavailable, readers could still access the news through the newspaper’s website and other digital channels. The episode concluded with the newspaper’s online services unaffected and the planned radio programming resuming after the morning disruption.