The Verge reports that the popular singer, between 12:10 and 12:20 p.m EST, posted two tweets imploring her more than 51 million fans to follow two people associated with the Lizard Squad, one of whom reportedly is the leader.
The account was recovered in about 15 minutes, after the two now-deleted tweets were retweeted more than 3,000 times. Still, this was no small breach, as Swift has the fourth-most followers of all Twitter users.
Apparently the Twitter hack wasn’t enough for the Lizard Squad, as soon after her Instagram page showed a picture telling her more than 20 million followers to follow the same user behind the Twitter hack. Again, the account was recovered a few minutes later and the photo was deleted.
Additionally, the Lizard Squad claims that they have nude photos of Swift, which they will post unless they are paid in Bitcoin. While it’s not clear whether or not there’s truth to this claim, last year’s huge celebrity nude photo leak shows that these leaks can be seriously damaging.
The Lizard Squad has been quite active in the past few months. They were responsible for a hack that took down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live around Christmas last year, leading to multiple arrests.
More recently, the group on Monday hacked the Malaysia Airlines website with a message that read “404 – Plane not found.”
