Taylor Swift’s Twitter, Instagram Accounts Hacked

Pop starlet Taylor Swift appears to have been targeted by the infamous hacker group Lizard Squad.

The pop star’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were briefly hacked on Tuesday, posting a number of messages before being removed.

One of the messages reportedly told users to follow a user with the handle @Lizzard, thought to be one of the leaders of Lizard Squad, as well as a number of other famous hacking groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous.

Shake It Off

The Lizard Squad hackers seemed to gain control of the @TaylorSwift13 Twitter account, which has 51.4 million followers, on Tuesday, as well as briefly managing to take over the singer’s Instagram account.

Taylor Swift responded to the hack on her personal Tumblr account.

“Well, now I’m awake,” she wrote. “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 also cheekily tagged the post with “hackers gonna hack hack hack hack hack”.

Other Attacks

Lizard Squad came to prominence in 2014 after taking down the online presences of numerous gaming companies, including Blizzard, Activision, and Sony.

It also carried out a bomb threat against a Sony executive in August. A Twitter user named “LizardSquad” began posting comments related to Iraq’s ISIS and the “Islamic State”. He tweeted that there might be “explosives” on board a plane carrying a Sony executive. The flight from Dallas to San Francisco was diverted to Phoenix, Arizona.

The Lizard Squad also claimed responsibility for the denial-of-service attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming networks at Christmas, which disrupted millions of online gamers throughout the holiday period.

Following that, a man was arrested in London. Another suspect was also reportedly arrested in Finland.

But those arrests have not apparently slowed the hackers.

A couple of weeks ago new research revealed that the Lizard Squad had been using unsecured home internet routers to power its LizardStresser service.

And earlier this week, Malaysia Airlines managed to restore its website to full functionality, following a compromise on Sunday by attackers claiming to be part of the hacker group Lizard Squad.

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