Hacker who breached Fast Company brags 'anyone could have done it'
The hacker used Apple News to send racist alerts to mobile devices
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The hacker who sent offensive push alerts on Apple News after gaining access to Fast Company's website Tuesday said in a recent interview that "anyone could have done it."
"I want to add that this was completely preventable; anyone could have done it and that anyone just ended up being me," the hacker, who uses the handle thrax, told Vice's Motherboard.
"It wasn't a sophisticated cyber attack from a foreign state, and it didn't require ‘specialist skills.’"
A person dressed as an internet hacker is seen with binary code displayed on a laptop screen in this double exposure illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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The hacker breached Fast Company's content management system Tuesday, gaining the ability to send two push notifications through Apple News that contained a racial slur and explicit language. The news company said in a tweet Wednesday the alerts "are vile and are not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company," adding it had shut down its website temporarily.
At the time of publication, Fast Company's website displayed a statement about the hack. Tuesday's incident came after an "apparently related event that occurred Sunday afternoon on FastCompany.com, when an unknown actor (or actors) posted similar language on the site's home page and other pages," Fast Company said in the statement.
Apple News disabled Fast Company's channel Tuesday evening after the push alerts, it said in a tweet. FOX Business reached out to Apple for comment on the hacker's remarks.
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An Apple logo hangs above the entrance to the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City, July 21, 2015. (REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo / Reuters Photos)
The push alerts "could have been a hoax threat-to-life event, a hoax nuclear fallout, the hoax death of President Biden, a crypto scam or anything else which could have had the potential to shift markets," thrax said, according to Motherboard. "Instead, I chose to embarrass Fast Company."
Fast Company said it "regrets that such abhorrent language appeared on our platforms and in Apple News," apologizing to those who saw it.
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The company is working with a cybersecurity firm to investigate the situation, according to the statement on its website.