New York Times Hacked? 103
First time accepted submitter porsche911 writes "It looks like the NYTimes have been hacked and a large number of subscribers spammed with messages about cancellation of their service. The phone system is overwhelmed as well. The Times is currently saying the email is a fake, but that raises other worries. They were one of the only 3rd parties that had the email in question so it appears either someone really screwed up or they've suffered a data breach."
Update: 12/28 21:59 GMT by S : Looks like it was just a mistake by an employee.
Re:Well, they tried hacking the The New Yorker fir (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems the New York Times keeps a spam list (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, they tried hacking the The New Yorker fir (Score:5, Interesting)
Too true, and too funny. You forgot to mention that this is also a method to retain customers after their dismal and continual failure to retain a readership base.
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Gmail's SPAM filter updates/adapts fast! (Score:4, Interesting)
So I got the email in my Gmail account, which is how I've signed up for home delivery of the NYT. I'll foolishly admit that I was fooled, and called the number in the email and got the recorded message saying that the line was busy (maybe that was the whole point, now they've got my number too).
Anyway, I didn't want to lose the delivery, so I marked the email as unread so that I could address it later and logged out of Gmail.
After about 20/30 minutes when this story broke on /. and other sties, I figured I'd log back into Gmail, check my email (what you don't compulsively check email?) and delete this spam. I couldn't find it in my inbox! I checked the trash thinking I may have deleted it, but it wasn't there. Then I thought to check the SPAM folder, and sure enough it was in there, still marked as unread.
Gmail updated the spam policy to classify this specific email as spam in about 20 minutes, where as it had made it into my inbox before.
Upon reflection, it's not surprising, I'm sure a lot of users marked it as SPAM in the last 20 minutes, but still was interesting for me to note. Gmail's spam filter is usually pretty good, I NEVER even look in the spam folder (even for false positives) so this was an interesting experience. I wonder if I'd left it marked as "read" and not remarked it as "unread" if it would still have been moved out from my inbox to the spam list?
Re:NY Times Response (Score:4, Interesting)
They also need to get their DNS updated to also include a genuine SPF record and not rely entirely on the TXT record.