The Washington Post: Hacker Sends Racist Message To iPhones Via Apple News

Fast Company, a U.S business and media publication announced that it had shut down its website on Tuesday evening after it was hacked and sent “obscene and racist” notifications to Apple users via the Apple News service which is provided by the maker of the iPhone.

Connecting a news publisher’s digital publishing tools to Apple News enables the publisher to send push notifications to Apple customers who have subscribed to the publisher’s channel.

The news publisher must be using the Apple News aggregation app. According to Fast Company, hackers breached the security of those publishing tools. Hackers sent two “obscene and racist push notifications” approximately one minute apart, according to a tweet by Fast Company. The company added that it had suspended the Apple News feed until the issue was resolved.

According to the publication, “We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed and shut down Fast Company.com until we are certain that the situation has been resolved.” When Reuters attempted to access the website of Fast Company on Tuesday evening, they were met with a 404 error message instead of the site’s homepage.

After the website was taken offline, Fast Company sent out a subsequent tweet in which it explained that its content management system, which is the software utilized by news organizations to publish and manage their stories, had been hacked to send out notifications. The channel for Fast Company was removed from Apple News, according to a tweet from the company.

On Sunday afternoon, Fast Company’s website was hacked in what the company described as an “apparently related” incident. As a result, the company was forced to take the website offline for approximately two hours after similar language appeared on the homepage. Publishing company Mansueto Ventures LLC is the owner of the business publication Fast Company.