Taylor Swift shakes off hacking of Twitter, Instagram accounts

Taylor Swift said her Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked on Tuesday, but the rogue posts were quickly removed from the social media services.

The 25-year-old Shake It Off singer, whose album 1989 has been atop the charts for the past three months, has built a following of young fans through social media.

“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,” said a statement posted on Swift’s personal Tumblr page.

“Never a dull moment,” the statement added before another posting said that Swift’s Instagram account had been hacked as well.

Celebrities are frequent targets of hackers who have posted personal and embarrassing information online in previous high-profile hacks.

The Grammy winner was back to tweeting two hours after the hacking.

“Cause the hackers gonna hack, hack, hack, hack, hack ...,” Swift tweeted, mimicking the lyrics to her hit Shake It Off.

The hacking of Swift’s accounts came as Facebook, the world’s largest social network, experienced a wide outage on Tuesday. A hacker group sought to claim responsibility, but the company said the outage was its fault.

Swift scoffed at the hacker who took over her social media accounts and threatened to release nude pictures, with the pop star saying none existed.

“Any hackers saying they have ‘nudes’?” Swift wrote after retaking control of her Twitter account. “Psssh you’d love that wouldn’t you! Have fun photoshopping cause you got NOTHING.”

Little was known about the presumed hacker, whose account was suspended by Twitter. The user who threatened to release nude photos had the Twitter handle @lizzard and signed as lizard in Japanese.

@lizzard, in a Twitter biography before the account was suspended, claimed — incongruously — to be affiliated at once with the hactivist collective Anonymous and North Korea.

Swift joked about the hacking, writing, “This is why I’m scared of technology.”

Swift is one of only four people with more than 50 million followers on Twitter. The others are U.S. President Barack Obama and fellow pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber.