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Tell HN: Scribd Breached

126•x______________•3h ago•51 comments

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Open in hackernews

Tell HN: Scribd Breached

120•x______________•3h ago
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.

Comments

TZubiri•3h ago
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•2h ago
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•2h ago
not even worth disclosing nowadays, almost entirely public info
derwiki•2h ago
Great reason to use privacy.com virtual cards wherever possible and online
tjwebbnorfolk•2h ago
yea, until privacy.com gets hacked
aliasxneo•2h ago
What would they do with my bank account and routing number?
AdieuToLogic•1h ago
> What would they do with my bank account and routing number?

Use it for money laundering and fraud.

parable•12m ago
This is good advice for anyone who lives in the USA, but there are hardly any adequate alternatives for the rest of the world, as far as I know.
fnord77•2h ago
I don't even think they actually pirated book pdfs. Just previews to get you to sign up that lead to no where
LordGronk•1h ago
Scribd has a ton of oop but copyrighted licensed content, which I highly doubt they pay licensing fees for.
collabs•2h ago
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•2h ago
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-...

x______________•9m ago
The email received is a rehash of the linked article, nice find.

>Why not tell all customers at once, especially if payment information was involved?

Answered in the article!

“Q: Am I affected? How will I be notified?

A: We are sending notices to affected individuals in phases, so not everyone has received theirs yet“

And also..

"Q: Where can I find the latest updates?

A: The latest updates regarding the incident will be made available on this page.“

..."Updated October 01, 2026 19:29"

For a site where you find data, they are completely devoid of any useful data on their own incident and redirecting everyone to phone calls where data cannot easily be shared.

bluecode•2h ago
No one is safe anymore.
Razengan•2h ago
Hide yo apps, hide yo websites, hide yo hosts
totetsu•2h ago
How long until we all get cyber-war fatigue and this isn't even news anymore.
Razengan•2h ago
Man, people stopped caring about all the leaks and breaches and dark web data sales over 10 years ago
Avicebron•1h ago
Is resignation because nothing was ever fixed or done about it because it wasn't "economically viable" considered not caring?
Razengan•1h ago
Until the people in power start going to jail or losing their jobs, instead of just paying fines as "the cost of doing business" from the company accounts, probably nothing will be fixed
Beez2Fancy•20m ago
U WIN @ teh internetz comments 2 nite. congrats!
dlt713705•8m ago
No one has ever been safe. I would rephrase it as: "More and more people are becoming aware of their exposure".
8cvor6j844qw_d6•2h ago
Did some exploit get disclosed? HN frontpage is spammed with breaches.
ipsum2•2h ago
The exploit is called AI (or LLMs)
PeterHolzwarth•2h ago
@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•2h ago
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
vigilantpuma•18m ago
I think that’s true for comments but not posts.
avree•1h ago
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.

Sn0wCoder•35m ago
Was the text light grey before you clicked the comments? Typically the link turns from almost black to light grey after you visit the site, just like a normal link will turn from blue to purple after you click the link to indicate you have visited the site. In this post for example the link goes to the 'Tell HN:' so the link goes directly to the comments. Could it be you did not pay attention until you had visited the comments once already??
PeterHolzwarth•11m ago
It's been 22 mins since I left my comment - the original post is still light grey (that doesn't mean much, but as this post accumulates upvotes, I don't yet see any change in test color).
Barbing•14m ago
It’s way, way too low contrast.

Edit: “@dang” apparently doesn’t ‘work’, but emailed this to hn@ycombinator.com

engineer_22•2h ago
Nice, I've been trying to hack scribd to download a pdf all day
paaloeye•2h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313197
paaloeye•1h ago
> 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•1h ago
I'm wonder how many users are exposed
Buttons840•1h ago
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?

AspireOne•1h ago
Regular people are often bad guys too, you know. If the reality was "bad guys will have it. Should regular people too?" The entire core dilemma would be entirely eliminated lol.
aslilac•56m ago
imagine if we just turned off 90% of the non-critical internet for two weeks, hardened up in an absolute mad dash where everyone has access to top tier cyber models, and then afterwards we go back to business as usual. it’d be a disaster short-term but long-term would it be worse than the years of slow drip we’re about to go through? idk! I kinda think it’d be interesting to find out!
AlecSchueler•30m ago
Imagine if everyone had just stayed at home for a week in 2020.
fyredge•20m ago
That was my first thought as well. With COVID, we recognised that WFH was viable for white collar work. Perhaps a global 2 week cleanse will allow everyone to re-evaluate life priorities outside of the internet.

I see hope in what happened during the blackout in Spain/Portugal.

cpa•46m ago
It is absolutely happening, paid by your taxpayer dollars (if you’re American).

Most major countries have this kind of programs. Those could probably be bigger and they will always miss obvious stuff but they exist, at least for CNI.

neya•1h ago
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•1h ago
You’re saying sribd has actually worked for people? I just ignore it in my searches and just find the pdf elsewhere.
kooi•1h ago
Not a security person, but are there standards for PII encrypted at rest?

Surely this is common? Surely?

mirashii•1h ago
This is a common sentiment, but the security story isn’t so clear cut as that. Encrypted at rest really just means that if you yank the disk out of the server, an adversary can’t read it. But if it’s a system that is online serving a database and you gain access to the application reading from the database, encryption at rest doesn’t save you. It’s obvious the application server must be able to read the decrypted data. If an adversary breaches the application, they get the data.
waste_monk•16m ago
>It’s obvious the application server must be able to read the decrypted data

Interestingly, that's not true. Homomorphic encryption can let you perform the same operations on encrypted data as on the plaintext, with the same results once decrypted. But it's vastly slower and less efficient - I know there are libraries like Microsoft SEAL but I've never seen any that uses it in practice.

parable•21m ago
Please forgive my stupidity, but is there any particular reason why companies never seem to disclose what "system" of theirs was breached? If this breach came about as a result of a security incident at a third-party, would it not benefit everyone minus the vendor to shift the blame? I understand that they say "our systems", but I've seen companies say this before when what they mean is "a system controlled by a vendor we contracted".
reassess_blind•20m ago
I run a few small scale SaaS products. This is a scary time.