Alleged New York Times Leak

 

"Today on 4chan someone leaked the source code (?) to the New York Times. They leaked 270GB of data

They wrote that the New York Times has 5,000+ source code repositories, with less than 30 being encrypted (?). It is 3,600,000 files in total" - https://x.com/vxunderground/status/1798856571931263480 

Not confirmed by NYT the alleged data breach which claimed to have accessed the repositories of the popular daily newspaper.  It appears that the attackers might have compromised and accessed an account related to GitHub or GitLab. These are online, in the Cloud, code repositories used by most companies around the globe. These can be accessed using a username and password just like any other web application. When security controls like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is not enforced, all it takes is one user with a weak password and sufficient permissions to compromise a company hub full of code repositories. 

Code repositories don't directly affect NYT customers or clients, however, they can potentially open the doors to attackers in the exploitation of other services that belong to the company. The code could leak credentials to third-party services that often used by applications, for instance, email providers; potentially allowing attackers to interact with the service on behalf of the compromised company.

As of this writing, the news is speculative and NYT has not yet confirmed the attack.