MUMBAI: Grammy Award winning singer Taylor Swift became a victim of cyber-terrorism on Tuesday, 28 January, when her Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked. Swift’s Twitter account is the fourth most-followed, with more than 51 million followers, behind only Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and US President Barack Obama.
Tweets posted by the hacker were deleted within 15 minutes, as Swift or Twitter itself, seemingly recovered the account. The hacker wrote a tweet encouraging Swift’s 51 million fans to follow someone claiming to be the leader of the hacking group ‘Lizard Squad’.
The hacker under the user name ‘@Lizzard’ also threatened to release nude photos of Swift in exchange for Bitcoin payment. In his profile, ‘@Lizzard’ claimed to be the ‘Leader of Lizard Squad, and a member of ‘LulzSec, Anonymous, UGNazi, ISISGang, GoP, globalHell, stc, zf0, htp, el8, GoD. lurk moar’, which internet sources confirm is located in North Korea. In response to the tweet, Swift said, “PS any hackers saying they have ‘nudes’? Psssh you’d love that wouldn’t you! Have fun photoshopping cause you got NOTHING.” (sic)
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Swift’s Instagram account was also hacked shortly thereafter, with the account posting a photo encouraging her fans to follow the same person associated with the Twitter hack. On Instagram, the ‘Black Space’ singer has over 20 million followers. That was also recovered after a few minutes, deleting the photo.
Through a post via her Tumblr account, Swift said, “My Twitter got hacked but don’t worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords.” “Never a dull moment,” she further added before finding out that her Instagram account had also been hacked.
The 25 year-old singer was back tweeting within a couple of hours of the hack. She tweeted rephrased lyrics of her now famous song, ‘Shake It Off’ and mocked the hacking activity, posting, “Cause the hackers gonna hack, hack, hack, hack, hack …” (sic)
Lizard Squad also claimed credit for outages that occurred early Tuesday at Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM (American Instant Messaging) and HipChat. A Facebook spokesperson denied the claim by saying, “Late last night many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”
