Tell HN: Scribd Breached
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.
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
TZubiri
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".
collabs
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
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
No one is safe anymore.
8cvor6j844qw_d6
Did some exploit get disclosed? HN frontpage is spammed with breaches.
PeterHolzwarth
@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?
engineer_22
Nice, I've been trying to hack scribd to download a pdf all day
paaloeye
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313197
paaloeye
I'm wonder how many users are exposed
Buttons840
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
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
You’re saying sribd has actually worked for people? I just ignore it in my searches and just find the pdf elsewhere.
kooi
Not a security person, but are there standards for PII encrypted at rest? Surely this is common? Surely?