hacked

The Lizard Squad group, who brought down PSN the other month and the Malaysia Airlines website just last week, are back again. This time it's Taylor Swift, the radically positive writer of pop earworms. What could her password have been? Something tells me shakeshakeshake would have been too obvious...

Update: Swift is back in control of her social media after this little snafu, claiming that any potentially compromising photos following this hack are fake (fake fake):



Meanwhile, alleged screencaps of her DMs have showed up, conversing in a totally normal way with Nick Jonas, PewDiePie and musician BØRNS. The stars, they DM pointless crap JUST LIKE US.

The tweet in question (which did not feature our lovely hotdog Photoshopping skills) has since been taken down and TWC Austin has issued an apology. It's unclear if this was the result of a hacked or hijacked account, a vengeful employee, or what. Either way, TWC News Austin's 33,000 Twitter followers got an extra helping of meat this week.

Last night, a hacker found his or her way into the social media accounts of at least nine different Major League Baseball Teams, posting status updates and tweets that ranged from the crude to the (admittedly) hilarious. Curse you, illegal criminal of cyberspace, for making me laugh!

All teams have since deleted the offending posts. The Chicago Cubs even followed up with the tweet: "For the record, the #Cubs are big fans of Bill Murray. #NotHacked."

The hacker is still at large (watch out, NHL!)

Update: Deadspin reports that the MLB Facebook and Twitter accounts were not hacked, but were instead at the mercy of a rogue employee working for the "Advanced Media" arm of the MLB (which collectively manages all its teams' online presence).

The posts may have been an inside joke and not meant for public eyes, but Deadspin also notes that employees working for the social media arm of the MLB are grievously underpaid.

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Facebook and Instagram were down for a brief period of time on Monday, and this was enough to send some people into a panic.

The local 911 dispatcher in the East Bay area of California told the Claycord blog that they received 5 different calls from people complaining about the outage.

“Our lines are [sic] dedicated to handle life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working,” the dispatcher said. “One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life threatening emergency.”

The hacker group Lizard Squad initially claimed responsibility for the outage, but Facebook later issued a statement denying the group’s involvement.

“Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram,” they said. “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.”

Fortunately it only lasted an hour, so these 5 terrible people were able to quickly get back to posting selfies, babies and gross food pictures. PHEW.

Over the weekend, reports emerged that the Ku Klux Klan passed out fliers and warnings indicating they would enact "lethal force" against Ferguson protesters should they display aggression in response to the grand jury hearing of the Michael Brown shooting.

Hactivist group Anonymous did not take kindly to these threats.

As of the morning November 16, the Ku Klux Klan still had control over their own tweets, as you're seeing from their official Twitter feed here (who knew that abject hate could be so tuned in to social media trends?). Just later that evening Anonymous seized the Twitter account to use to their own ends, changing its profile picture to their own iconic image and tweeting things like this: