US business and media magazine Fast Company said it shut the website Tuesday night following a hack attack on the website and delivered “obscene as well as racist” messages to Apple users through The iPhone manufacturer’s Apple News service.
News publishers who use the Apple News aggregater are able to connect their online publishing software to Apple News and send out push messages directly to Apple customers who have subscribed to the channel of the publisher. Fast Company said hackers broke into these publishing tools.
Hackers issued two “obscene and racist push notifications” within a few minutes, Fast Company said in an email, and added that it was suspending it’s Apple News feed until the incident was completed.
“We are looking into the issue as well as suspending the feed and the website FastCompany.com until we’re sure that the issue has been addressed,” the publication added.
The Fast Company website was unavailable and it displayed a 404 error on the page when it was viewed on Reuters on Tuesday night.
In a follow-up tweet following the closing, Fast Company said that the content management system that it uses which is the software utilized by news media outlets to manage and publish their content – was compromised to send out notifications.
Apple News said in a tweet that it had removed the Fast Company channel.
Fast Company said it had previously suffered an “apparently connected” hack on their website, on Sunday in which similar language appeared on its homepage which led to it shutting the website down for approximately two hours.