Piers Morgan hacked Twitter account spews posts for an hour

Piers Morgan’s Twitter account was hacked overnight and issued a series of lewd and racist comments for about an hour before it was shut down and cleaned up.

Feed for the British TV commentator’s program on Sky, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” posted a screenshot “In case you were wondering, @piersmorgan has been hacked,” states his now-blank profile.

In addition to deleting comments scattered with the F-word and the N-word, Twitter cleaned up all other posts Morgan had shared with his 8.3 million followers since joining the platform in November 2010.

“Any chance of getting him back, @elonmusk?” the “Piers Morgan Uncensored” post asked the owner of Twitter.

The incident started late on Monday night and Twitter users including Journalist Yashar Aliquickly began posting screenshots of some racist and derogatory posts and comments that it appeared Morgan’s account had been hacked.

A screen recording The account takeover, posted by Irish photographer Tom Flynn, shows that it lasted for about an hour before the account was shut down.

The hackers changed Morgan’s name several times, including some offensive nicknames, as he posted comment after comment, including an insult to the late Queen Elizabeth II. Before it was deleted when the account was deleted, Morgan’s profile photo featured him with the Queen, who died in September.

Some critics of Morgan suggested that the offensive stream was not much different from the controversial host’s typical commentary.

Morgan has been making headlines in recent weeks for his criticism of Meghan and Prince Harry, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, after revealing the Netflix documentary earlier this month.

Earlier Monday, information security and technology news site bleeping computer reported that a “threat actor” posted an offer on the “Breached” hacking forum to sell the public and private data of the 400 million Twitter users scraped in the 2021 data breach for $200,000. The site is commonly used to sell user data stolen in data breaches.

The report said the forum post included sample data for 37 celebrities, politicians, journalists, corporations and government agencies, including Morgan along with US Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump Jr., Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary.

Bleeping Computer reported that a large sample of 1,000 Twitter user profiles was later leaked. It said that the threat actor “Ryushi”, who posted the sale, said they wanted to sell Twitter data to an individual or back to Twitter, and would then delete the data. “If no exclusive purchases are made, they will sell copies to multiple people for $60,000 per sale,” the report said.

Ryushi said that Twitter did not respond to his attempt to pay the data ransom.

It is unclear whether the hacking of Morgan’s account was related to the data breach.

On his recently reinstated account, political commentator Keith Olbermann launched a campaign to become Twitter’s next CEO early Tuesday, with one of his platforms, “Keep account of @PiersMorgan Permanently hacked as this latest content is far less offensive than his usual tweets.