Scribd breach affects users across multiple platforms
Scribd, Slideshare, Everand, and Fable users received breach notifications on October 26.
What to know
- Scribd sent breach notifications on October 26, 2026, stating an unauthorized third party may have accessed user data.
- The breach affects Scribd and its subsidiaries: Slideshare, Everand, and Fable.
- The disclosure went largely unnoticed in mainstream coverage until a Hacker News user posted about the notification on October 30.
Scribd Inc. Breached companyEpiq Notification partner
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Hacker News user surfaces breach disclosure
A Hacker News user posted about receiving the Scribd breach notification, noting they had not seen the incident covered elsewhere. The post gained 104 points and 33 comments.
“We detected that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to certain user d…”
— Scribd Inc. · source -
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 comments1…
2 more of the top 3 · 30 posts in this stretch
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Tell HN: Scribd Breached C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0312756 posted on 2026.10.30 at 22:46:36 (c=0, p=11)
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As someone who has helped to secure critical national infrastructure several years ago, I can say that it was a mess to disclose the vulnerabilities I identified, and in some cases it took years to patch them. Some of these vulnerabilities were RCEs and mass PII leaks. It's simply not worth the risk for most people - who aren't in the USA - to…
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background
Scribd security incident disclosed via user notification — Scribd Inc. sent breach notification letters to users on October 26, 2026, stating that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to user data. The notification was sent on behalf of Scribd and its subsidiaries (Slideshare, Everand, and Fable) through notification partner Epiq.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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2 outlets Tell HN: Scribd Breached
first by HN Best, 12d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 30 · verbatim
- Oct 31
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What actually is Scribd?They were always just that thing that showed up in Google searches cause they scraped presentations and stuff that was unknowingly public. But I didn’t quite know why anyone found them of value.
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IMHO our best hope is some benevolent grey hat or government organization unleashes a well-aligned AI botnet to patch everything it can find before the black hats do.
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> last 4 digits of your credit card and country, credit card issuer, credit card expiry dateThis particular set of beached data could stop existing if, instead of reusing a set of fixed data for payments, your bank allowed you to generate a unique code that sent a one-time (or recurring, locked to a single vendor) payment to the recipient.
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What's great about this is that the primary thing exposed (credit card info) is also one of the least worrying things to have exposed, as a user.You can just get a replacement credit card.
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I'm sure this is happening but I also wonder if ironically those systems are hardened by adversaries. I could imagine nation state actors, once they're in, hardening the systems themselves so they can keep their presence and exclude others.Using that access is the kind of thing that is only done when there's a need and in the case of really…
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AI is actually a big reason why there are so many vulnerabilities over the past year and a half. People don't even know what their code bases look like anymore. It's really bad so sayeth my friends doing consulting.A lot of companies cyber security posture is asking Claude to "find all security issues make no mistakes".
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So here we are. We’re in the new era of technology. Whoever has the best agents will win. As airport security, this is an asymmetrical war: the effort to protect your systems is going to be much higher than hacking them in the future. It’s just my opinion, but I foresee this happening given the strong capability the models are showing in reverse…
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> Not seeing anything posted about this anywhereBecause nobody uses this cancer scam website lol.
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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?
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Don't worry - Siri is on it - that's actually why they've been so lacklustre. Just too busy hacking for the good guys
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It looks like we all enjoyed "Security through obscurity", where obscurity was referring to existing vulnerabilities.And also, that this is over.
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Tell HN: Scribd Breached Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0312756
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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.
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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.
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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…
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@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?
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Tell HN: Scribd Breached Link: Comments: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0312756
- Oct 30
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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.