YHK - yet another hacker news clone

88 points x______________ 2 hours ago 31 comments

Not seeing anything posted about this anywhere, received on Monday, 26th of Oct 2026:

Subject: Notice of Security Incident

This notice is being sent on behalf of Scribd, Inc., the parent company of Scribd, Slideshare, Everand, and Fable, by Epiq, Scribd Inc.’s notification partner.

Hello,

We are writing to let you know that Scribd, Inc. recently experienced a security incident that may have affected your data.

We detected that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to certain user data in one of our systems. After investigating this activity, we found that the third party may have accessed your email address and the following of your information: last 4 digits of your credit card and country, credit card issuer, credit card expiry date, payment history (not including credit card details).

We have no evidence that this data has been misused, but we are notifying you out of an abundance of caution so that you can take steps to protect your information.

Watch for phishing

We encourage you to stay vigilant for phishing attempts by bad actors pretending to be Scribd, Inc. or Scribd, Slideshare, Everand or Fable.

Remember that Scribd, Inc. will never ask you for your username and password or other sensitive information via email or text. If you did receive a message like that:

    Don't click on any links in it. Instead type scribd.com, slideshare.net, everand.com, or fable.co directly into your browser.
    Call us at: +1-877-361-9887. Hours of operation are Monday-Friday, 11:00 a.m.-11:00 p.m., Central European Time.
    Report it through Scribd, Inc.'s Help Center.
For more information

We regret that this incident occurred and any concern it may cause you. If you have additional questions, contact the dedicated call center at +1-877-361-9887. Hours of operation are Monday-Friday, 11:00 a.m.-11:00 p.m. Central European Time.

The National Cyber Security Center has helpful guidance on how to recognize and avoid phishing scams here.

What Scribd, Inc. is doing

    We have secured the affected system and ended the unauthorized access.
    We have notified law enforcement as well as the relevant data protection authorities.
    We are working with an expert third party cybersecurity firm to strengthen our access controls and monitoring.
We value the trust you place in us with your information, and don’t take that lightly. We are deeply sorry this happened and will keep you updated if anything further changes.

Scribd, Inc.

TZubiri 1 hour ago | parent

Wonder if there's anything of worth.

Hackers got their hands on a loot of 300k pirated book pdfs? And internal documents that were already leaked by someone that googled "how to share a pdf".

coldfloor 1 hour ago | parent

Geez, I know nobody here clicks through and reads articles before commenting, but are we not even reading the posts now?

>we found that the third party may have accessed your email address... last 4 digits of your credit card and country, credit card issuer, credit card expiry date, payment history

TZubiri 1 hour ago | parent

not even worth disclosing nowadays, almost entirely public info

derwiki 59 minutes ago | parent

Great reason to use privacy.com virtual cards wherever possible and online

tjwebbnorfolk 45 minutes ago | parent

yea, until privacy.com gets hacked

aliasxneo 36 minutes ago | parent

What would they do with my bank account and routing number?

AdieuToLogic 23 minutes ago | parent

> What would they do with my bank account and routing number?

Use it for money laundering and fraud.

fnord77 1 hour ago | parent

I don't even think they actually pirated book pdfs. Just previews to get you to sign up that lead to no where

LordGronk 14 minutes ago | parent

Scribd has a ton of oop but copyrighted licensed content, which I highly doubt they pay licensing fees for.

collabs 1 hour ago | parent

I don't see any email like this in my inbox. Perhaps they are only sending this email to those who have their payment information saved on Scribd?

smurda 1 hour ago | parent

I only received this same email a few hours ago, Oct 30. Why not tell all customers at once, especially if payment information was involved?

And they posted about a security incident on their blog on Oct 1. https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/53787421531284-...

bluecode 1 hour ago | parent

No one is safe anymore.

Razengan 58 minutes ago | parent

Hide yo apps, hide yo websites, hide yo hosts

totetsu 38 minutes ago | parent

How long until we all get cyber-war fatigue and this isn't even news anymore.

Razengan 36 minutes ago | parent

Man, people stopped caring about all the leaks and breaches and dark web data sales over 10 years ago

Avicebron 18 minutes ago | parent

Is resignation because nothing was ever fixed or done about it because it wasn't "economically viable" considered not caring?

Razengan 3 minutes ago | parent

Until the people in "power" start going to jail or losing their jobs, instead of just paying "the cost of doing business" from the company accounts, probably nothing will be fixed

8cvor6j844qw_d6 54 minutes ago | parent

Did some exploit get disclosed? HN frontpage is spammed with breaches.

ipsum2 46 minutes ago | parent

The exploit is called AI (or LLMs)

PeterHolzwarth 42 minutes ago | parent

@dang, always been curious about this: why are posts like this grey text vs dark test? It's difficult to read, being so low-contrast. I assume it's based on numbers, the poster, up/downvotes etc - but it seems a poor use of those systems given it sacrifices readability. Is it just a light mode thing? Is it just me?

dozerly 33 minutes ago | parent

I always assumed it was the down arrow affecting it, but I have always giggled at the fact that people with sharp eyes have to endure the bad posts while others do not

avree 12 minutes ago | parent

As far as I know this is a relic from the PG days. It was done to keep the focus on URL based submissions, and avoid people using the platform as a text/blogging platform (at the time, Reddit was rising, and self posts there were already very common.) URLs were dark, text was meant to support the URL and was lighter.

I think the color actually got lightened a few times.

engineer_22 31 minutes ago | parent

Nice, I've been trying to hack scribd to download a pdf all day

jacquesm 30 minutes ago | parent

Mixed feelings. I feel sorry for the people whose info was taken but Scribd does not have my sympathy.

paaloeye 28 minutes ago | parent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313197

paaloeye 26 minutes ago | parent

> We detected that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to certain user data in one of our systems. After investigating this activity, we found that the third party may have accessed your email address and the following of your information: last 4 digits of your credit card and country, credit card issuer, credit card expiry date.

paaloeye 24 minutes ago | parent

I'm wonder how many users are exposed

Buttons840 20 minutes ago | parent

I'd feel a lot better if I knew some red team security researchers were going hard trying to break into critical national infrastructure, just to ensure it's not too easy, but probably this isn't happening because it would be a felony to even try. The bad guys are free to try though.

All this will tend to get blamed on AI, but AI didn't put these vulnerabilities into place. AI is just a tool that can be used to discover vulnerabilities, and the only question we have to answer is whether or not that tool should be available to regular people.

Some will try to frame the question as being about whether we should allow AI aid in cyber-security, but that's not the question. This technology isn't going away. The bad guys will have it. Nations will have it. Again, the question is, can regular people also continue to have it?

neya 15 minutes ago | parent

Scribd is the most predatory site that steals people's content and then doesn't honor their promise (upload a PDF to download one..oops that one doesn't qualify, but we will keep your copy!). Fuck em, they built their entire model on predatory behaviour towards broke college students, hope they burn to the ground.

isatty 13 minutes ago | parent

You’re saying sribd has actually worked for people? I just ignore it in my searches and just find the pdf elsewhere.

kooi 7 minutes ago | parent

Not a security person, but are there standards for PII encrypted at rest?

Surely this is common? Surely?