‘Incredibly offensive’ Apple News alert sent from hacked Fast Company account

Apple users were shocked to receive an “incredibly offensive”, racist push notification after hackers took control of a news outlet’s account.

Apple iPhone users were shocked to receive an “incredibly offensive”, racist push notification after hackers took control of a popular news outlet’s publishing system.

The alerts were sent to Apple News by the account of business publication Fast Company on Tuesday evening, US time.

The message, repeated twice, contained a shocking racial slur and described a graphic sex act, followed by “THRAX WAS HERE”.

It’s unclear exactly how many Apple News users received the notification but reactions flooding social media suggest it went out widely.

“Did anyone else get this Apple News alert from Fast Company? Someone is in trouble,” one Twitter user wrote.

The news aggregation app is installed by default on iOS devices in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Censored image of the ‘incredibly offensive’ Apple News alert. Picture: Twitter

“An incredibly offensive alert was sent by Fast Company, which has been hacked,” Apple News wrote on its official Twitter account. “Apple News has disabled their channel.”

Fast Company subsequently went offline completely after social media users pointed out that the same hackers appeared to have also edited an article on its website with a similar message.

“Fast Company’s Apple News account was hacked on Tuesday evening,” the publication wrote on Twitter.

“Two obscene and racist push notifications were sent about a minute apart. The messages are vile and not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company.

“We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed and shutdown http://FastCompany.com until we are certain the situation has been resolved.”

Journalist Matthew Keys highlighted the edited article on the Fast Company website, which had its headline changed to “HACKED BY VINNY TROIA”, a reference to a well known cybersecurity researcher.

It’s not clear how many people received the alert.

“The name ‘Thrax’ appears to belong to a VIP-level user of the online forum Breached, which is popular with hackers and cybersecurity researchers,” Keys wrote.

“An earlier post referenced two other hackers, ‘Badhou3a’ and ’TheKiloB’ – not clear what their connection is.”

Breached, where users trade information stolen in security breaches, is the same forum at the centre of the massive Optus customer data hack.

Tech publication The Verge reported that another article was posted to Fast Company’s website before it was taken down featuring a message from “postpixel”, describing how the attack was carried out.

The message claimed the hackers were able to get in using a password that was shared across many accounts, including an administrator.

“Wow, Fast Company,” the post read.

“Despite the public defacement of your site, which boasts millions of visitors, all you did was hastily change your database credentials, disable outside connections to the database server, and fix the articles.

“What an absolute disgrace of a news source, and one that I would personally avoid …”

Fast Company has since revealed that its content management system was compromised.

“To clarify: Fast Company’s content management system (CMS) was hacked on Tuesday evening, which impacted our Apple News alerts,” the company wrote.

Originally published as ‘Incredibly offensive’ Apple News alert sent from hacked Fast Company account