Fast Company Hackers Sent Out Obscene Push Notifications To Apple News Users

Hackers infiltrated Fast Company's push notifications to send out racial slurs on Tuesday night. They also stole a database that includes employees' emails, password hashes for some of them and unpublished drafts, among other information. Customer records are safe, though, most likely because they're kept in a separate database. Engadget reports: In a statement, Fast Company has told Engadget that its Apple News account was hacked and was used to send "obscene and racist" push notifications." It added that the breach was related to another hack that happened on Sunday afternoon and that it has gone as far as shutting down the whole FastCompany.com domain for now. [...] Apple has addressed the situation in tweet, confirming that the website has been hacked and that it has suspended Fast Company's account. At the moment, Fast Company's website loads a "404 Not Found" page. Before it was taken down, though, the bad actors managed to post a message detailing how they were able to infiltrate the publication, along with a link to a forum where stolen databases are made available for other users. They said that Fast Company had a default password for WordPress that was much too easy to crack and used it for a bunch of accounts, including one for an administrator. From there, they were able to grab authentication tokens, Apple News API keys, among other access information. The authentication keys, in turn, gave them the power to grab the names, email addresses and IPs of a bunch of employees. In a statement, Fast Company said: "Fast Company's content management system account was hacked on Tuesday evening. As a result, two obscene and racist push notifications were sent to our followers in Apple News about a minute apart. The messages are vile and are not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company. We are investigating the situation and have shut down FastCompany.com until the situation has been resolved. Tuesday's hack follows an apparently related hack of FastCompany.com that occurred on Sunday afternoon, when similar language appeared on the site's home page and other pages. We shut down the site that afternoon and restored it about two hours later. Fast Company regrets that such abhorrent language appeared on our platforms and in Apple News, and we apologize to anyone who saw it before it was taken down."

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