Tell HN: Scribd Breached

190 points - today at 2:46 AM

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

Buttons840 today at 4:37 AM

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?

Elfener today at 8:48 AM

Isn't this that website that keeps coming up in my web search results, apparently having a pdf of the thing I searched, except it's actually a badly html-ed version of said pdf with no way to download the original one?

1317 today at 7:39 AM

So if someone's got into their systems can they put a dump of all the PDFs up somewhere?

x______________ today at 7:00 AM

Seems Scribd made the news 13 years ago for the same issue[0] [1] and an archive.org link of the original-now-deleted announcement[2]!

0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493280 Scribd hacked – emails and hashed passwords leaked (scribd.com) 106 points by joosters on April 4, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 65 comments

1 https://thenextweb.com/news/scribd-reveals-it-was-hacked-thi...

2 https://web.archive.org/web/20130407114005/https://support.s...

Notable callouts from 2013: "Our investigation indicates that no content, payment and sales-related data, or other information were accessed or compromised. We believe the information accessed was limited to general user information, which includes usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords."

"We take our responsibility to protect our users' data extremely seriously and constantly improve our security infrastructure and policies. Following this incident, we have implemented numerous additional safeguards. Not only have we taken steps to address the specific issues that led to this incident, but we are also conducting a comprehensive security review and are implementing more general measures to proactively enhance security. We are also alerting relevant authorities to the matter and will co-operate with their investigation."

avazhi today at 9:16 AM

> Not seeing anything posted about this anywhere

Because nobody uses this cancer scam website lol.

smurda today at 3:42 AM

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-...

prodigycorp today at 9:16 AM

i'm probably going to spend next or next next weekend having an ai agent go thorugh my old accounts in 1password and have them delete 75% of them. Any surface area on the internet is risk nowadays, and cleaning up after the fact is a bigger headache.

jacquesm today at 4:27 AM

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

neya today at 4:42 AM

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.

vrotaru today at 6:48 AM

It looks like we all enjoyed "Security through obscurity", where obscurity was referring to existing vulnerabilities.

And also, that this is over.

parable today at 6:07 AM

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 today at 6:08 AM

I run a few small scale SaaS products. This is a scary time.

isatty today at 4:44 AM

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

bluecode today at 3:42 AM

No one is safe anymore.

paaloeye today at 4:28 AM

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

collabs today at 3:40 AM

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?

rememo42 today at 7:10 AM

How do we even know which credit card is affected by this if we want to cancel it?

kooi today at 4:50 AM

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

Surely this is common? Surely?

8cvor6j844qw_d6 today at 4:02 AM

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

paaloeye today at 4:32 AM

I'm wonder how many users are exposed

engineer_22 today at 4:26 AM

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

xvector today at 6:27 AM

It's so interesting seeing all of these breaches and then going back to the old threads on Mythos and seeing the widespread skepticism and denial on HN.

pquigley today at 4:26 AM

[flagged]

PeterHolzwarth today at 4:15 AM

@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?

TZubiri today at 3:21 AM

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".