Pierluigi Paganini
December 27, 2016
Sony Music Entertainment’s Twitter account was compromised and hackers posted the news of the Britney Spears’s death.
“RIP @britneyspears #RIPBritney 1981-2016” and “Britney spears is dead by accident! We will tell you more soon #RIPBritney.” states the messages posted by the hackers.
Sony Music Entertainment quickly deleted the messages and confirmed the hack of its account.
“Sony Music Entertainment’s Twitter account was compromised. This has been rectified,” it said.
“Sony Music apologizes to Britney Spears and her fans for any confusion.”
Separately, the official Twitter account for Bob Dylan featured a tweet that read:
“Rest in peace @britneyspears,” but the message was later deleted.
Adam Leber, a spokesman for the pop star told CNN the news was fake.
“I assume their account has been hacked,” said Spears’ manager, Adam Leber.”I haven’t spoken to anyone… as of yet but I am certain their account was hacked. Britney is fine and well. There have been a few Internet clowns over the years who have made similar claims about her death, but never from the official Sony Music Twitter account.” said the spokesman.
Who is behind the hack?
Security experts suspect the account was hacked by the notorious hacker group OurMine, the same that recently hacked the NetFlix account and the accounts belonging to many Very Important People.
OurMine is a very popular hacker group that hacked multiple high-profile accounts including Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, David Guetta Daniel Ek, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and many others.
The group uses to hack the accounts to demonstrate the poor security, then it offers its consultancy to prevent future attacks.
Two Tweets posted by the hacked Sony Music Entertainment’s Twitter account suggest the involvement of the OurMine Team:
“We detected unusual activity on the account and we checked the account if it’s hacked or not”, states one Tweet, followed by, “we saw a new IP logged in to the account a few minutes ago and the tweet is posted by a new IP so @britneyspears is still alive #OurMine”.
This isn’t the first time hackers target Sony, in November 2014 the hacking group known as GOP broke into the company systems and stole sensitive information, including employees data.
The FBI blamed the North Korea for the cyber attack.
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(Security Affairs – Sony Music Entertainment, Ourmine)
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