You ever wonder how the suits upstairs keep the wolves at bay? How they spin their web of half-truths and outright bollocks into something that smells like legitimacy? Enter Business Wire: the corporate megaphone since 1961. For a fee, they make your spin look like gospel. But behind the sheen? Repeated breaches, hoaxes and high-frequency trading nightmares. This is the wire’s real record.
It’s the sort of operation that thrives on trust, you see. Trust that when a release hits the wires, it’s solid, it’s vetted, it’s the real deal. Bollocks. Time and again, Business Wire’s been caught with its trousers down, letting the crooks and the clowns waltz right in. And now, here’s Cummins – that engine-guzzling behemoth with its own laundry list of sins – cosy up to them like they’re old mates at the pub. Is this just another thread in Cummins’ tangled ecosystem propping up a machine that’s been grinding out controversies since the diesel fumes first choked the air? Let’s crack this open, shall we? No kid gloves, no apologies. Just the truth.
The Pitch: What the Hell Do They Even Do?
Business Wire isn’t some back-alley flyer printer. No, these pricks are the gold standard for corporate megaphones, or so they claim. For a fee – and we’re talking packages that can run into the thousands depending on how far you want your lie to travel – they’ll blast your press release across the globe. We’re talking syndication to thousands of outlets: Reuters, Bloomberg, the lot. Financial terminals light up like Christmas trees, journalists get pinged, and suddenly your quarterly earnings or your shiny new product launch is everywhere. It’s efficient, it’s slick, and it’s about as trustworthy as a politician’s promise.
They’ve got the tech to make it seamless: secure portals for uploads, embargo options to keep the vultures waiting, even multimedia embeds if you want to dress up your drivel with videos and infographics. Clients range from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 titans, all queuing up to pay for that veneer of credibility. And yeah, they offer services to Cummins, no question. Case in point: Cummins’ 16 Sep 2025 Business Wire release on a Komatsu hybrid mining deal – paid, polished, syndicated. Perfect PR. Potentially fragile plumbing. Cummins gets their eco-friendly spin out there, Business Wire pockets the fee, and the cycle spins on. But when your media mouthpiece has got form for fumbling the ball on security and authenticity, you have to ask: is this the clean break Cummins needs, or just another dirty hand in the pot?
Cummins, bless their diesel-stained souls, have been knee-deep in their own shit for years – emissions scandals that make your eyes water, regulatory fines that stack like unpaid bar tabs. Now they’re leaning on Business Wire to polish their image? It’s like hiring a fox to guard the henhouse, only the fox has a track record of leaving the door ajar for every passing weasel.
Cracks in the Facade: A Litany of Fuck-Ups
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Business Wire’s resume reads like a rap sheet for a second-rate con artist. They’ve built an empire on the promise of secure, reliable dissemination, but the reality? A parade of breaches that should have regulators circling like sharks. Start with the early days, when the internet was still a wild frontier. In 1999, some clever bastards – or utter pricks, depending on your view – paid up and posted a hoax release about a fictional outfit called Webnode snagging $100 million in funding. It went viral on message boards, spooked investors, and left Business Wire scrambling to sue for fraud and trademark infringement. They won a settlement, sure, but it exposed the gaping holes: pay the fee, spin the yarn, and watch the chaos unfold. That wasn’t a one-off glitch; it was a warning shot they ignored.
Fast forward to 2005, and shit gets properly dark. An Estonian finance firm, Lõhmus Haavel & Viisemann, allegedly turned Business Wire’s own client portal into a goldmine for insider trading. Using some scraped-together spider software, they hoovered up non-public scoops from upcoming releases, netting at least $7.8 million in dodgy trades. The SEC came knocking with a lawsuit, dragging Business Wire into the mess as the unwitting – or was it? – enabler. No full releases were nicked, they claimed, just backend snippets, but it was enough to rattle the cages. Clients rallied behind them, apparently, but come on – if your system’s leaky enough for this, what else is slipping through?
Then 2010 rolls around, and the hoaxes come back with a vengeance. A fake release purporting to be from Javelin Pharmaceuticals hits the wires after 11 p.m. on a Friday, claiming a Supreme Court win for Big Pharma. Retracted by breakfast, but not before the damage rippled out. Business Wire called it in to the FBI, banned email submissions, and mandated their proprietary portal for all future drops. Noble, perhaps, but it reeks of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted – twice. These aren’t abstract cock-ups; they’re the kind that erode faith, one fraudulent blast at a time.
The rot didn’t stop there. In 2015, a ring of Ukrainian hackers allegedly infiltrated Business Wire and other wires, stealing unpublished press releases to fuel a $100 million insider trading bonanza. The SEC charged over 30 defendants worldwide, exposing how these bastards traded ahead of market-moving news. And don’t get me started on 2018. A relentless DDoS attack crippled their site for days, starting 31 January. Business Wire said no client data was lost; still, they cut direct feeds to speed-traders while they investigated. Persistent, they called the assault. I’d call it a fucking indictment. In an era where information is currency, Business Wire’s repeated stumbles aren’t just embarrassing; they’re a liability. For outfits like Cummins, who rely on this pipe to pump out their narrative, it’s a gamble. One more breach, and that collaboration announcement? It could be tomorrow’s punchline in a trading scandal.
These incidents, isolated as they might be painted, form a pattern. A company that can’t keep its own house secure is hardly the bedrock you want for your most sensitive disclosures. And when the clients include polluters and profiteers, the stakes climb higher. Allegedly, they’ve tightened up since – enhanced protocols, better vetting – but trust is a fragile bastard, and Business Wire’s shattered it more than once.
The Overlords: Berkshire Hathaway’s Shadow
Ah, but who pulls the strings? Since 2006 (acquired 2006), Business Wire’s been tucked under the Berkshire Hathaway umbrella, that sprawling conglomerate lorded over by Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha – or the Emperor of Evasion, if we’re being honest. Buffett’s a folk hero to some, a billionaire sage doling out wisdom like stale biscuits. But scratch the surface, and Berkshire’s got skeletons rattling louder than a freight train in a storm.
Take the 1991 Salomon Brothers debacle: Buffett stepped in when the firm got caught rigging Treasury auctions with fake bids, nearly torching Wall Street. He testified to Congress, slapped in reforms, and walked away burnished. Heroic? Or just damage control for a sinking ship Berkshire had skin in? Then there’s the 2011 Sokol scandal, where a top exec allegedly bought shares in a target company before pushing the deal through, misleading the old man himself. Sokol got the boot, an internal probe cleared Buffett, but it stank of cosy governance, the kind where loyalty trumps scrutiny.
The hits keep coming: that 2008 Goldman Sachs bailout amid the crash, when Berkshire pumped in $5 billion while the bank faced SEC fraud raps over toxic mortgages. Profitable, sure – a $3.7 billion windfall – but it fed the crony capitalism beast. Fast forward to the Wells Fargo fake accounts fiasco in 2016-2018; Berkshire sat on half a billion shares as the bank cooked up millions of ghost accounts. Buffett grumbled, sold late, took a $1.8 billion bath, but the optics? Rotten.
Berkshire’s no monolith of virtue; it’s a machine optimised for profit, controversies be damned. Business Wire fits right in – a quiet cog disseminating the gloss over the grit. For Cummins, partnering with this lot means swimming in waters already muddied by the parent company’s sins. Is it complicity? Or just business as usual in the ecosystem of the damned?
Cummins’ Dirty Dance: Another Cog in the Machine?
Cummins Inc. – engines for trucks, generators, the heartbeat of heavy industry – has never shied from the spotlight, or the shitstorms. They’ve paid out billions in settlements over emissions cheats, dodged fines like pros, and built an empire on fuel that’s choking the planet. Now, they’re turning to Business Wire to broadcast their green-tinged tales, like that Komatsu collab on hybrid mining tech. Paid, polished, and pushed out without a hitch.
But here’s the rub: in an ecosystem riddled with enablers, does Business Wire count as another tainted link? They’ve serviced Cummins for years, from leadership shuffles to engine launches, all funnelled through their secure – ha – channels. It’s convenient, it’s credible on paper, but given the breaches, the hoaxes, the Berkshire baggage, it raises eyebrows. Cummins’ history is a litany of regulatory dodges and environmental reckonings; layering on a distributor with its own dodgy dossier feels less like strategy and more like symbiosis. Two giants, each with scars, propping each other up while the world burns a little hotter.
Allegedly, the ties run deeper than one release. Cummins’ investor relations page links straight to Business Wire archives, a steady drip of announcements that shape the narrative. But when your mouthpiece has been gamed by hackers and hoaxers, that narrative frays. Is this what Cummins needs, or just another veil for the old games? The ecosystem’s interconnected, alright – and it’s starting to smell like collusion.
The Reckoning: Time to Unplug the Wire?
Business Wire isn’t evil incarnate; it’s the mundane machinery of modern mendacity, grinding out the stories that keep the corporations humming. But fuck, the toll. From prankster pranks to multimillion trading rorts, they’ve been the unwitting – or negligent – conduit too many times. Owned by a titan with its own parade of scandals, servicing clients like Cummins who drag their own baggage, it’s a toxic brew.
We deserve better than this half-arsed trust. Demand your company show the vendor-vetting. Demand the wire publish its audit logs. If we don’t insist, this will keep happening.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Business Wire Sues Pranksters – WIRED
- Lohmus Haavel & Viisemann, et al. – SEC.gov
- Business Wire bans email submissions after hoax – Reuters
- Hackers Infiltrate Corporate News Service Business Wire – SecurityWeek
- Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire Suffers Cyberattack – WSJ
- Warren Buffett Controversies That Have Threatened His Reputation – Investopedia
- The Warren Buffett Scandal That Nearly Destroyed Wall Street – YouTube
- Cummins and Komatsu to Collaborate on Joint Mining Hybrid Power System – Business Wire