The Nius leak reaches beyond subscribers into the newsroom’s confidential relationships

Almost nine gigabytes of data from Nius are publicly exposed, CORRECTIV reported on October 8. The material includes records concerning roughly 12,000 subscribers, home addresses in many cases, partial card details for some people, and 21,489 entries from the editorial system.

The dataset also contains information about people who spoke with the newsroom. CORRECTIV says it checked samples against published material and other records, but deliberately withheld personal information and the identities of writers apparently using pseudonyms.

Editor Julian Reichelt acknowledged on October 7 that a leak had occurred in May or June and said a criminal complaint was planned. Berlin’s data-protection authority told CORRECTIV it had received four notifications of data incidents since June 2025, most recently on October 6. Those notifications do not necessarily concern the same dataset.

Analysis: source protection depends on how a newsroom stores ordinary operational data, not only on how reporters communicate. The remaining questions concern notification, remediation and whether confidential contacts face continuing exposure. Public availability of the stolen records is no justification for republishing them.