Fans of Formula One International auto racing were sent strange messages over the holiday weekend after the sport's official app was
hacked.
Forbes reports that the messages received by users of the F1 app over the July Fourth weekend are believed to be linked to a targeted cyber-attack.
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." Programmers have been 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.
Speaking to ESPN, an F1 spokesperson said that probe into the incident
“confirms that this targeted attack was limited to the Push Notifications Service.”
The spokesperson went on to say that F1 will “continue to investigate, review and improve safety measures but,
at this time, have no reason to believe that any customer data has been accessed during this incident.”
