For many science journalists, a week would not be complete without one or more trips to the Eurekalert website. Put together by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Eurekalert is one-stop-shopping for press releases about the latest scientific findings, aggregating material provided by scientific journals, research institutions, and more.
If you’re an established science journalist, you can also sign up for access to news before it’s news. Log in with the right credentials, and you can see press releases and, in many cases, entire research papers up to a week before they’re unleashed on the public. You just have to agree to never publish anything about the work until a specific date and time—the information is under an embargo until then.
Late Tuesday night, however, access to the site vanished, replaced by a notice that the site had been hacked and that the hackers had started leaking embargoed press releases. Only two releases made it out before access was pulled, and if those are anything to go on, the hackers have absolutely no sense of what makes for cutting-edge science.