(Bloomberg) — A hacker who infiltrated Fast Company, a publication owned by billionaire Morningstar Inc. founder Joe Mansueto, sent obscene push notifications to the home screens of Apple News users on Tuesday at night, causing a shutdown of the magazine’s website.
The US-based business magazine, published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, said on Twitter that “two obscene and racist push notifications were sent one minute apart” after its content management system was hacked on Tuesday evening .
Apple Inc.’s news aggregation service, which curates stories from media providers, had 125 million monthly active users as of early 2020. It was not immediately clear how many people were receiving push notifications. The company had 1.8 billion active device users earlier this year.
Apple News said in a tweet that it disabled the Fast Company channel on its platform after the hack. Apple could not immediately be reached for further comment. In a separate statement to Bloomberg News, Fast Company said Tuesday’s hack follows an “apparently related hack” of its website that occurred Sunday afternoon, when similar language appeared on the homepage of the site and other pages, with the site closed and restored. two hours later on the hour.
Fast Company apologized to users who saw the message and said it is investigating the incident and has shut down both its feed and its website until it is sure the situation is resolved. “The messages are vile and out of line with the content and ethos of Fast Company,” he said.
(Updates with number of active iPhone users; an earlier version of the story corrected the number of Apple News users)
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