As unpleasant as it is to read about another hack attack on a big-name company, there is something strangely amusing about the way in which the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a data breach of its own network.

“Computer systems housing The Wall Street Journal’s news graphics were hacked by outside parties, according to Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co.,” reads the lede of the Journal’s story, which then goes on to quote an unnamed spokesperson for the very paper that is reporting on the matter: “We are investigating an incident related to wsj.com’s graphics systems. At this point we see no evidence of any impact to Dow Jones customers or customer data.”

And rather than writing that “Bonnie in IT says she’s taken affected systems offline,” the Journal report cites the ever-present “people familiar with the matter.”

Additionally, no one at the Journal would go on record to the Journal about whether the hack had resulted in any damage or tampering to news graphics, but an anonymous source at the paper tells the paper that none has been found so far.

The Journal is coming clean about the hack after a hacker wrote on Twitter that he’d breached the newspaper’s website and would sell user info and access to the servers for Bitcoins. The access promised by the hacker could, according to security experts give buyers the ability to “modify articles, add new content, insert malicious content in any page, add new users, delete users and so on.”

[via Ars Technica]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.