Britney Spears is not dead, and hackers targeting celebrities isn’t something new.
The iCloud hacks of 2014, dubbed the “Fappening”, are a testament to that, but the latest celeb-targeting hack comes via Twitter – a veritable landmine of hacked celebrity accounts that include Mark Zuckerberg, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, Drake, Kate Perry and even the NFL.
The hacked Twitter account in this case is that of Sony Music Global, and the hack involved a tweet that international pop star and Grammy Award winner Britney Spears had passed away, according to a Reuters report. Another tweet on legendary poet/singer/songwriter Bob Dylan to the same effect is also thought to be part of the same hack. Incidentally, Spears and Dylan are both Sony artists.
A group called OurMine claims to be responsible for the hacks, but this has not been confirmed. Sony Music’s account has since been “rectified,” according to a spokesperson for the music label. The statement also mentioned that Sony “apologizes to Britney Spears and her fans for any confusion.”
Another story goes that a hacker with the handle Tessa88@exploit.im hacked into Twitter and managed to get no less than 32 million user IDs and passwords around June this year and then proceeded to sell that data on the dark web, but at this point we don’t know if the Sony Twitter hack is part of that large chunk of compromised user data.
That incident came hot on the heels of a hack on Russia’s Facebook equivalent, called VK.com. The VK hack involved 1 million accounts, which were then allegedly sold on the dark web.
The trend of large companies having their data compromised and their users put at risk is nothing new. Even before the iCloud Fappening, Yahoo’s servers were hacked in August 2013, resulting in what is now a total of 1.5 billion users accounts being compromised. Much of that data has been offered for sale on the dark web, but the hacks only came to light late this year in two separate revelations by Yahoo.
It may have started well before three years ago, but the threat of large-scale hacks has escalated over time, until the most recent internet outage involving a botnet DDoS attack that took out large chunks of internet connectivity across the United States.
As such, cybersecurity is now coming to the forefront of everyone’s concern, from governments to individual users. But the biggest problem seems to be that most of the talent seems to be on the dark side of this fight. Manpower shortages in the field of cybersecurity are looming large, with the entire domain exhibiting a rare condition called “zero unemployment.” That means there are no qualified candidates without a job in cybersecurity. In fact, the open positions are twice the number of total available candidates.
As the talent shortage worsens, the frequency of hacks is likely to increase because the perpetrators know that their “enemies” are severely short-staffed. What that will eventually result in is something we can only imagine at this point.
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