14 DAY TRIAL // The hacker Ethical Spectrum has defaced the official websites of Miley Cyrus (mileycyrus.com), Selena Gomez (selenagomez.com), Taylor Swift (taylorswift.com), Nicki Minaj (mypinkfriday.com), Chelsea Handler (chelseahandler.com) and Britney Spears (britneyspears.com).
I can confirm that these are the artists’ official websites because they’re all linked from their official Twitter accounts.
The hacker first targeted some of these websites on March 8. However, he defaced them again earlier today. In the first series of defacements, Ethical Spectrum posted a picture of meme characters dancing, along with the message “Hacked. For more security, [email protected].”
However, today, he has defaced the sites with a message in which he blames Greg Patterson – the COO and co-founder of ground(ctrl), a company that specializes in creating websites for artists – for the attack.
The most likely scenario is that ground(ctrl) has created the websites of Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Chelsea Handler, Nicki Minaj and Britney Spears. After the hacker breached the company’s systems, he could easily gain access to the sites they’ve created. ground(ctrl)’s official website has also been defaced.
In case the name Ethical Spectrum is familiar to you, that’s because he recently made some headlines after he hacked into the systems of Finland-based game developer Supercell. In February, he managed to hijack the Facebook pages for Hay Day and Clash of Clans, a couple of games made by Supercell.
Initially, the hacker offered to help the company secure its systems. After seeing that his offer was ignored, he decided to demonstrate that the vulnerabilities he found were serious.
This is probably what happened in the case of ground(ctrl). He offered his services to the company and they either ignored his notifications or they told him something that he didn’t like.
At the time of writing, all of the aforementioned websites are still hacked.