"Official Formula 1 App Hacked"
Fans of Formula One International auto racing were sent strange messages over the holiday weekend after the sport's official app was hacked. A spokesperson for F1 stated that no customer data is believed to have been compromised during the incident. Two push notifications were sent out, the first of which, delivered at around 8PM CEST on Saturday, only contained the message "foo." The researchers stated that programmers are known to use the metasyntactic variable "foo" as a placeholder for a value that can change, depending on conditions or on information passed to the program. App users were then sent a not so confusing but more worrying message that read, "Hmmmm, I should check my security.. :)". The unsettling incident, which prompted F1 to launch an investigation, appeared to end there. An F1 spokesperson said that a probe into the incident confirms that this targeted attack was limited to the Push Notifications Service. The hack raised some concerns among the app's users. Researchers stated that while this hack may only have resulted in a mischievous message being sent to users, it certainly had the potential to be much worse. The researchers also stated that In-app messages could, for example, be used to create very convincing phishing campaigns.