This morning (Dec. 26), hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of Sony Music Global and one of its acts, Bob Dylan. They attempted to start an internet hoax by claiming that Britney Spears had died.

"RIP @britneyspears," read the tweet from @SonyMusicGlobal, which was accompanied by a crying emoji. “#RIPBritney 1981-2016.” A few minutes later, another tweet went out, reading, “britney spears is dead by accident! We will tell you more soon. #RIP Britney.” According to Yahoo! Music, a few other tweets had a group called OurMine taking responsibility for the breach.

At roughly the same time, Dylan’s feed sent out a tweet that said, “Rest in peace @britneyspears” with the same emoji. Approximately 45 minutes later, another read, “OurMine checked Britney Spears twitter account if it’s hacked or not and they detected that it’s hacked! @britneyspears is still alive!!”


Within an hour, Sony had deleted the offending tweets and then issued a statement. "Sony Music Entertainment's Twitter account was compromised,” it read. ‘This has been rectified. Sony Music apologizes to Britney Spears and her fans for any confusion."

OurMine has hacked such Twitter accounts as Marvel and Netflix in the past week, and previously broke into Variety’s website and e-mail system. A Wired profile this summer reveals that they also broke into the feeds of the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Spotify and Amazon. Their actions are an attempt to promote their security services, offering a website scan for $1,000 and a full company audit for $5,000. “We are not blackhat hackers," an anonymous member told the magazine, "we are just a security group…we are just trying to tell people that nobody is safe.”

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