Famous bands and musicians of Twitter, lock your doors and bar your windows because there are hackers on the loose! Anyone whose Twitter bio says something like “Check out the new album on so-and-so records!” with a link to a merch store is in danger, especially if they skew toward the indie/alternative side of things and are reasonably famous. At this point, the biggest victims we’re aware of are Bon Iver, Tame Impala, Keith Richards, and Tenacious D, but there could be any number of obscure nobodies out there whose accounts have been hijacked—it’s just that people only really notice when it happens to someone famous.
Word of most of these hacks comes from Pitchfork, which caught on to Tame Impala’s attack before the others. Apparently, the band’s Twitter account began posting links to (presumably) the hacker’s real social media accounts—which sounds like a great idea—before switching over to bomb threats, tweeting “I HAVE 15 C4’S IN MY BAG AND 12 PIPEBOMBS IN MY BAG ALSO” at the official JetBlue account. At some point after that, Bon Iver’s account got hit as well, with the hackers also plugging their own Twitter accounts before posting what Pitchfork calls “racial slurs” and “insensitive comments” about Muhammad Ali. Keith Richards’ account was also hacked, but we don’t know what bad stuff the hackers posted before the young person he employs to manage his profile regained control.
It’s unclear if those hacks were related or if their similarity is some weird coincidence, but the person who took over the Tenacious D account seems to have had a much more direct “prank” in mind. Early this morning, a hacker tweeted “It is with a heavy heart I am to announce that Jack Black passed away last night at 3:37am” from the official Tenacious D account, and then followed that up with “It’s just a prank bro.” Fans freaked out a little—according to The Huffington Post—but the band got the page back a few hours later and posted that Black is “ALIVE and WELL.”
Weirdly, most of the hackers who advertised themselves (or the accounts that were advertised, at least) haven’t been suspended yet, but that could be because CBS recently dumped the only squad of ace anti-hackers that could’ve protected our beloved rock/indie/folk/country icons from something like this. Where is James Van Der Beek’s Agent Elijah Mundo when the world needs him the most?