China-linked hackers are suspected of spying on News Corp. journalists

The media giant News Corp has launched an investigation into a cyberattack that accessed the email and documents of some of its journalists and employees.

News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, sent an internal email stating that it had been the target of "consistent nation-state attack activity" on Friday.

David Kline, News Corp chief technology officer, wrote in an email that the company discovered attack activity on a system used by several business units on January 20th.

As soon as News Corp discovered the attack, it notified law enforcement and launched an investigation with the help of cybersecurity company Mandiant.

In the cyberattack, "a small number of business email accounts and documents" were compromised from News Corp's headquarters, Dow Jones, News UK, and New York Post entities.

According to Kline and O'Brien, News Corp. believes "threat activity" has been contained. However, they did not elaborate on why they believed that was the case, nor how long the hackers may have been inside the network.  

"Our preliminary analysis indicates that foreign government involvement may be associated with this activity, and that some data was taken," Kline wrote. "We will not tolerate attacks on our journalism, nor will we be deterred from our reporting."

According to The Wall Street Journal, pro-China accounts flooded Twitter with the #GenocideGames hashtag on Tuesday. The act of hashtag flooding is the act of hijacking a hashtag on social media platforms to dilute or change its meaning.