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Obscene Apple News notification first sign that Fast Company was hacked

Last updated

Hackers used Fast Company's Apple News access to send obscene push notifications, which has led to the complete removal of the website's content from the internet.

On Tuesday, business-centric news outlet Fast Company sent two obscenity-laden push notifications to its Apple News followers.

Apple News responded by disabling the feed and acknowledging the incident on Twitter.

Fast Company also acknowledged the hack in a tweet.

Recipients of the push notification quickly took to Twitter to post screenshots of the alerts, which included a slur.

According to The Verge, there was also a post on the Fast Company website that detailed how the malicious party was able to sneak behind the company's security protocol.

The hackers then linked to a forum post where they revealed they would release thousands of employee records and draft posts from Fast Company's database. They also informed readers that customer information was stored in a different database to which they did not have access.

This all led to a situation where the Fast Company owners decided to take the entire site down. The site was pulled shortly after the incident and hacker response, and as of 6:42 AM ET, the site remains offline.

Fast Company isn't the only company to get hacked recently. In mid-September, Uber suffered a data hack.

In early September, Samsung informed customers that customer data had been stolen in July.

Update 6:43 AM ET Updated with information on Fast Company having been taken down.



8 Comments

anantksundaram 18 Years · 20391 comments

What’s Fast Company? Who still actually reads AppleNews?

:-D

racerhomie3 7 Years · 1264 comments

What’s Fast Company? Who still actually reads AppleNews?

:-D

I read Apple news and am a news + subscriber

jgreg728 8 Years · 113 comments

What’s Fast Company? Who still actually reads AppleNews?

:-D
I read Apple news and am a news + subscriber

As am I. Underrated service. Love reading through it on my iPad like it’s an interactive newspaper/magazine. 


That being said I saw this incident be posted on Reddit and didn’t think it was real. How crazy. 

freeassociate2 3 Years · 217 comments

Remember when hacking meant doing interesting or clever things? 

Marvin 18 Years · 15355 comments

jgreg728 said:
What’s Fast Company? Who still actually reads AppleNews?

:-D
I read Apple news and am a news + subscriber
As am I. Underrated service. Love reading through it on my iPad like it’s an interactive newspaper/magazine. 
That being said I saw this incident be posted on Reddit and didn’t think it was real. How crazy. 

Apple News is actually used quite a lot with 125 million monthly users reported:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/30/apple-news-now-has-125-million-monthly-active-users

Reddit is reported to be over 400 million:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/04/reddits-monthly-active-user-base-grew-30-to-reach-430m-in-2019/

Twitter is over 300 million:

https://financesonline.com/number-of-twitter-users/

Around 1/3 the reach of twitter is pretty good for a news feed. It is sometimes used more than the traditional news outlets:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/27/apple-news-is-the-most-viewed-news-app-in-the-uk-but-bbc-is-used-for-more-time