Mariah Carey‘s Twitter account has been hacked and used to post a series of racist slurs.
The attack came as the world prepared to celebrate the New Year, and saw the account taken over for a prolonged amount of time.
During the hack, the official account – which has more than 21 million followers – posted a series of unexplained links, racist slurs, references to a long-time feud with Eminem as well as other bizarre tweets.
Nearly half an hour later, the hackers seemingly lost control of the account and the posts were deleted.
Those posting from the account claimed to be from “Chuckling Squad”, a hacking group that also took control of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey‘s over summer as well as other high-profile users of the site.
In all of those hacks, similarly racist and inflammatory tweets were sent by the accounts.
During the hack on Mr Dorsey, the group used a largely neglected text messaging service to gain control of his account. That appeared to be traced back to a security issue with the CEO’s Twitter account.
“The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider,” Twitter posted from an official account after Mr Dorsey was hacked. “This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved.”
That did not appear to be the case with Carey’s account, since the tweets were coming from Twitter’s own web service rather than a third-party source.
The group has seemingly used other forms of cyber attacks to gain access to other high-profile accounts.
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