Lizard Squad hacks Taylor Swift, offers nudes for Bitcoin
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Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad appears to have ticked off another entry on its achievements list today having successfully hacked the Twitter and Instagram accounts of Taylor Swift.
The hack occurred Tuesday morning with multiple tweets appearing on Swift’s Twitter account; the first encouraged her fans to follow user @Veriuser, with a second tweet urging users to “go follow my boy @lizzard;” of note both accounts have since been suspended.
Swift confirmed the hacking on her Tumblr account, saying that “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.”
In a later post to Tumblr she confirmed that her Instagram account was also hacked.
Shortly after the attack, the hackers claimed they had obtained nude photographs of Swift and said they would release the photos once they had received 3 Bitcoins in donations. Swift denied having nude photos, and replied:
PS any hackers saying they have 'nudes'? Psssh you'd love that wouldn't you! Have fun photoshopping cause you got NOTHING.
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2015
Throughout the day Swift joked about the hacking, posting tweets such as this:
Cause the hackers gonna hack, hack, hack, hack, hack…
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2015
The new hack from Lizard Squad follows a busy time for the group after they successfully put both XBox Live and Playstation Network offline on Christmas Day in a coordinated denial of service (DDoS) attack, hacked the Malaysian Airlines site, and then claimed to have taken down Facebook and Instagram Tuesday, although Facebook have denied that Lizard Squad was responsible.
In between times Lizard Squad tried to subvert user anonymity on the Tor Network, and launched their own DDoS for hire service.
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