Newsquest Media Group

Newsquest Media Group is aUK-based media organisation that operates local newspaper websites and publishes print editions across the United Kingdom. It delivers news to local audiences through both digital platforms and traditional printed newspapers. The organisation uses a centralized content management system to manage its numerous online sites. The 2024 website defacement was reported to have likely exploited this centralized content management system. While specific audience or circulation figures are not disclosed, the scale of the group's online presence is evident from incidents that affected potentially hundreds of its local newspaper websites. The 2019 security breach involved a virus injected into the group's server infrastructure, which compromised numerous local news websites. That attack hijacked visitors' browsers, showing a false "thank you for your loyalty" message before redirecting them to unrelated prize promotion pages. Hundreds of thousands of readers were impacted by the forced redirection, which directed traffic to external sites hosting deceptive offers.

The 2024 defacement replaced website content with a fabricated story titled "PERVOKLASSNIY RUSSIAN HACKERS ATTACK" and featured a Cyrillic byline and group branding. No substantive text accompanied the defacement in archived examples, and no print editions were compromised in that incident. Although the defacement was attributed by the attackers to a group claiming to be "first-class Russian hackers," no definitive attribution to any state‑linked actor was confirmed. Newsquest's headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, and the source material does not provide further details about its ownership or parent/subsidiary structure.