Hack Results In ‘Obscene’ Apple News Notifications

Apple iPhone users have may been surprised this week, after it was reported that some had received “obscene and racist” notifications via the Apple News service.

Reuters reported US business and media publication Fast Company as saying that it had shut down its website on Tuesday evening after the site was hacked.

Silicon UK checked the Fast Company website and sure enough, it is still offline as 12.20pm BST Wednesday.

Obscene notifications

Apple News is of course an aggregation app that news publishers can connect to their digital publishing tools, which will send push notifications to Apple customers who subscribe to the publisher’s channel.

Fast Company reportedly said hackers broke into those publishing tools.

Hackers sent two “obscene and racist push notifications” about a minute apart, Fast Company said in a tweet, adding it had suspended the Apple News feed until the situation was resolved.

CMS breach?

In a subsequent tweet after the shutdown, Fast Company said that its content management system – software used by news outlets to publish and manage their stories – had been hacked to send the notifications.

Apple News meanwhile said in a tweet that it had disabled Fast Company’s channel.

Fast Company added in a latter tweet that it had earlier suffered an “apparently related” hack of its website on Sunday afternoon, when similar language appeared on its home page, causing it to shut the site down for about two hours.