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.
I see hope in what happened during the blackout in Spain/Portugal.
And they posted about a security incident on their blog on Oct 1. https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/53787421531284-...
>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.
I think the color actually got lightened a few times.
Edit: “@dang” apparently doesn’t ‘work’, but emailed this to hn@ycombinator.com
Surely this is common? Surely?
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 anything that uses it in practice.
They stated that they're doing a staggered rollout for email notifications which states at the beginning of October with other users reporting receiving the email yesterday[0].
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313006
In retrospect, this was the correct way to proceed.
The docs I found were content, but nothing that could be used for its original purpose. Splurging a monthly subscription to find out sucked, but being breached and getting my info stolen is a kick in the ass.
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
> but there are hardly any adequate alternatives for the rest of the world, as far as I know.
Maybe start with your bank?
My local (Central European) bank offered virtual cards service yesterday to which I declined setting them up on site, will strongly reconsider now, thanks!
Use it for money laundering and fraud.