Amber Neely
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.
An incredibly offensive alert was sent by Fast Company, which has been hacked. Apple News has disabled their channel.
— Apple News (@AppleNews) September 28, 2022
Fast Company also acknowledged the hack in a tweet.
Fast Company's Apple News account was hacked on Tuesday evening. Two obscene and racist push notifications were sent about a minute apart.
— Fast Company (@FastCompany) September 28, 2022
The messages are vile and not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company. (continued below)
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.
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
8 Comments
What’s Fast Company? Who still actually reads AppleNews?
:-D
Remember when hacking meant doing interesting or clever things?