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.
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.
Scribd, Inc.
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?
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.
And they posted about a security incident on their blog on Oct 1. https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/53787421531284-...
Surely this is common? Surely?
I think the color actually got lightened a few times.
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".
>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
Use it for money laundering and fraud.