Subscribers to the American magazine Fast Company they received obscene notifications from Apple News, because of a hacker attack. In addition to sharing racist epithets last night, the cybercriminals also took the publication’s official website offline.
Hackers attack Fast Company and send ‘obscene’ notifications on Apple News
Many users were amazed, some even posted some screenshots on Twitter. It seemed that someone in the business publication had gone mad. Instead, no member of the Fast Company was in control of it anymore.
A group of hackers attacked the publication, starting to send “obscene and racist push notifications“. According to the publication, a hacker attack that hit the fastcompany.com domain on Sunday afternoon was at the center of the matter. At the time of writing this article, the site is still inaccessible: visiting it exits “404 error”.
The magazine’s statement
The publication communicated what happened to colleagues in the American press. “Fast Company’s content management system was hacked on Tuesday evening. For this, our followers on Apple News have received obscene and racist push notifications every minute, approximately. The messages are vile and not in line with Fast Company’s content or ethos ”.
The publication further assures that “We are investigating the situation and have closed FastCompany.com until the situation is resolved. Tuesday’s hacker attacks follow up on a related attack on FastCompany.com Sunday afternoon, where similar language appeared on the site’s homepage and other pages. We closed the site that same afternoon and we put it back online about two hours later. Fast Company is sorry that such abhorrent language has appeared on our platforms and in Apple News, and there we apologize to anyone who saw it before we removed it ”.
Apple News also commented on the situation in a tweet: “An incredibly offensive alert was sent by Fast Company, which was hacked. Apple News has disabled that channel ”.
The ‘provocation’ of hackers
Before Fast Company managed to shut down the site, the hackers managed to post a post explaining how they infiltrated the publication, even posting a link to a forum where they sell stolen data to databases.
According to hackers, Fast Company has one password di default per WordPress, easy to hack. And that they also used on several other accounts, including one with administrator permissions. In this way they were able to obtain gods authentication token, Apple News keys and other information. Including personal data of various employees.
A user called Thrax reported that the hackers will publish 6,737 employee data, from emails to unpublished drafts of articles. However, they would not have had access to no user data, because they are stored on another database.
The attack seems still ongoing, we will keep you updated on the developments.