The online edition of Le Soir – Belgium’s biggest French-speaking newspaper – was offline for a number of hours after Belgian media group Rossel was targeted in a cyber attack.

“‘Le Soir’ is regularly attacked by hackers,” said newspaper director, Didier Hamann, on Twitter. “But this time the firewall is not working as usual.”

The website was down from 19:00 local time Sunday evening until early Monday morning, after editors were left with no choice but to disable the website.

The attack affected all of Rossel’s sites, including Sudpresse, but did not affect the print edition of the paper.

This attack comes just days after French television broadcaster TV5 Monde was hacked by self-styled cyber jihadists.

It is not yet known who is behind the attack on Le Soir, but the website’s lack of security has already been exposed and IT teams within Le Soir should be working hard to implement more stringent security controls to prevent an attack like this happening again.

For internationally-recognised information security management controls, download a copy of the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standard. It sets out the requirements for an information security management system (ISMS) that can be audited and certified, and its international status can help win new business as well as providing recognition that you take information security seriously.