HN Explorer

Pushbullet Channel Has Been Compromised

4 points by binoyxj ↗ HN
Trolls are editing Wikipedia pages to push random crap [1] to the 'Google Acquisitions' Pushbullet channel. Pushbullet, FYI, crawls content from various sources [2] for their automated channel push notifications.

[1] https://twitter.com/binoyxj/status/632451202618228736 [2] https://twitter.com/binoyxj/status/632453672421584896

2 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 13.7 ms ] thread
greenyoda
If Pushbullet is designed to announce changes to Wikipedia pages, then it hasn't been compromised - it's working exactly as intended. The real question is, should people be relying on Wikipedia - which any random person (or troll) can edit - as a source of actionable information?

If I were interested in the latest news about which companies Google had acquired, I'd be crawling Google's Investor Relations pages, not Wikipedia.

Theo59
That's a really good point, I've been using Pushbullet for a year now and didn't realise these announcements weren't verified. If anyone wants to see the troll announcements: http://www.clipular.com/c/5738478393360384.png?k=Qv9rfMKnRDe...

Edited: The Google channel may just be a rare exception, I've not sure about how the notifications are triggered but it may be unfortunate that the urls contain both "google" and "acquire <4chan>" but then just links to a a google search result.