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Hacking in the dark (icon image): It is still completely unclear who took control of the website
Photo: Techa Tungateja / iStockphoto / Getty Images
Users of the Apple News service were quite surprised on Tuesday evening: Between the latest from Washington and news about corona vaccines, obscene, racist messages suddenly appeared on their cell phone displays.
It was a hacker attack.
Unknown attackers had taken control of Fast Company's editorial system and used their access to send push messages on behalf of the US news site.
It is already the second IT security incident within a short period of time.
The Fast Company website went offline for two hours on Sunday after an attacker apparently managed to gain access to the editorial system.
However, the first attack was limited to the homepage of the information service.
However, the operators had obviously not completely solved their security problem, so that the attacker or attackers could still gain access to the news page and this time also triggered the push messages.
In response to the news, Apple News deactivated Fast Company's account.
Then the publisher shut down the associated website completely to prevent a repeat.
"We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed and shut down FastCompany.com until we are certain the situation is resolved," Fast Company said on Twitter.
The website was still offline on Wednesday morning German time.
tmk/Reuters