Piers Morgan’s Twitter account was hacked overnight and spewed a series of crass and racist comments for nearly an hour before it was shut down and wiped clean.
The feed for British TV commentator’s program on Sky, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” posted a screenshot of his now-blank profile, stating, “In case you were wondering, @piersmorgan has been hacked.”
In addition to removing the F-word and N-word strewn comments, Twitter wiped clean all other posts Morgan has shared with his 8.3 million followers since he joined the platform in November 2010.
“Any chance of getting him back, @elonmusk?” the “Piers Morgan Uncensored” post asked Twitter’s owner.
The incident began late Monday, and Twitter users, including journalist Yashar Ali, quickly began posting screenshots of some of the racist and abusive posts with comments that it appeared Morgan’s account had been hacked.
A screen recording of the account takeover posted by Irish photographer Tom Flynn shows it lasted nearly an hour before the account was shut down.
The hackers changed Morgan’s name multiple times, including some offensive monikers, as they posted comment after comment, including several insulting the late Queen Elizabeth II. Before it was removed when the account was wiped, Morgan’s profile photo showed him with the Queen, who died in September.
Some critics of Morgan suggested the offensive stream wasn’t very different from the controversial host’s typical commentary.
Morgan has been in the spotlight in recent weeks for his criticism of Meghan and Prince Harry, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, following their revealing Netflix documentary earlier this month.
Earlier Monday, the information security and technology news site Bleeping Computer reported that a “threat actor” had posted an offer to sell the public and private data of 400 million Twitter users scraped in a 2021 data breach for $200,000 on the “Breached” hacking forum. The site is commonly used to sell user data stolen in data breaches.
The forum post included sample data for 37 celebrities, politicians, journalists, corporations and government agencies, including Morgan, along with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump Jr., Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary, the report said.
A larger sample of 1,000 Twitter user profiles was leaked later, Bleeping Computer reported. It said that the threat actor “Ryushi,” who posted the sale, said they want to sell the Twitter data to a single person or back to Twitter itself, and will then delete the data. “If an exclusive purchase is not made, they will sell copies to multiple people for $60,000 per sale,” the report said.
Ryushi said Twitter had not responded to their effort to ransom the data.
It’s not clear if Morgan’s account hacking was related to the data breach.
On his recently restored account, political commentator Keith Olbermann early Tuesday launched a campaign to become Twitter’s next CEO in which one of his platforms is, “Keep the account of @PiersMorgan permanently hacked since this latest stuff is far less offensive than his normal tweets.”
