EurekAlert took down its website last night following an incident which the service has labeled as "a serious security breach."
All links pointing to the site now redirect to a page that informs users of the incident. The page is dated September 13, 2016 10:10 p.m. EDT.
In the statement plastered to its homepage, EurekAlert said they were notified of a possible security breach on September 11, and as a response, their staff started preparing a password reset for all user accounts.
A subsequent investigation revealed that someone had aggressively tried to hack into the service on September 9.
EurekAlert, which is a science news journal run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), holds information on site subscribers, but also scientific research, which scholars submit to the website under embargo to be published at a specific date.
Ginger Pinholster, Chief Communications Officer and Director for AAAS, says that while the EurekAlert staff was working to reset user passwords, the hacker started releasing embargoed news articles based on unpublished research
Staffers quickly identified the files as stolen from the site and shut down their website for an in-depth investigation and the implementation of new security protocols.
EurekAlert says that only passwords from user accounts seem to be compromised, but not financial information from subscribing institutions.
Softpedia has reached out to AAAS for additional comment on the incident. The EurekAlert breach notification is embedded below, in both image and text formats.
Statement on EurekAlert website