As if the Sun-Times needed any more problems lately, the newspaper’s website came under cyber attack Saturday.
Some morning visitors to suntimes.com found the site had been replaced by an "under construction" page from its domain host, Network Solutions. Others found nothing at all.
Later in the day, Sun-Times editors tweeted: “Yep. One of our vendors got hacked and it's trickling down.” Followed by: “Thanks for your patience and apologies for our site issues. All should be cleaned up in the next few hours.”
Under the headline “Sun-Times sites hit by hack on vendor,” managing editor Craig Newman posted this message to readers:
"Early Saturday morning, due to a security issue through our domain name vendor, some areas of suntimes.com and some of our associated sites fell victim to cyber attack.
"While the hack was detected early and countermeasures were put in place quickly, many of our readers may have experienced trouble accessing our sites on a variety of platforms. In fact, it may take some hours more before all traces of the attack have been eradicated as we continue to work with our vendor on the issue. Some of you may have no problems at all, while for others error screens and redirects may appear.
"At no point during this attack were any of our readers’ personal information or accounts in danger. Aside from inconvenience in reaching our content, there should be no further problems for anyone accessing suntimes.com or our other domains and the security of your personal information is not at risk in any way.
"Thank you for your patience as we continue to clean this matter up."