Hacker steals Katy Perry's Twitter account, sends insults to her 89 million followers

The unknown hacker managed to get a hold of the most popular Twitter account out there.
 By 
Stan Schroeder
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Katy Perry's Twitter account -- the largest on the social network, with a whopping 89 million followers -- got hacked Monday. The hacker, identified only by Twitter handle @sw4ylol, used it to send racist and homophobic slurs to the pop singer's followers, as well as love messages to rival singer Taylor Swift. 

Additionally, the hacker, whose Twitter account was still active at the time of writing, appears to have posted an unreleased Katy Perry song to SoundCloud. 

Control over the singer's Twitter account has apparently been restored by its owner, and offending tweets were deleted, but not before they were immortalized in the form of screenshots on many of Katy Perry's followers' accounts. 


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Warning: The screenshot below contains racist and homophobic words. 

SoundCloud has removed the offending track, called Witness 1.3, from its service, as documented by the hacker himself. 

The motives behind the hack are unclear. The singer did not publicly comment the hack on any of her social networking accounts.

Katy Perry has now joined the growing number of celebrities whose social networking accounts were hacked. The list includes Taylor Swift, whose Instagram and Twitter accounts got hacked in January 2015, and Justin Bieber, whose Twitter account was temporarily hijacked in March 2012. 

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Stan Schroeder
Stan Schroeder
Senior Editor

Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.

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