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Lady Gaga Twitter, Facebook pages recover from iPad 2 scam hacks

Lady Gaga's Twitter and Facebook pages were hacked on Monday, tricking some of her millions of followers to a scam website looking to suck up victims' personal information.

RELATED: Best & Worst celebrity tech moments of 2011 

The attack  lured victims to a scam site with the offer of a free iPad 2. The singer has over 17 million Twitter followers and 45 million-plus Facebook fans, and the BBC reported that more than 100,000 of them fell for the ruse. 

The offending message on Facebook read:

"Lady Gaga's new iPad comes out in 3 days! So for the next 72 hours we will be hosting a massive giveaway to all the Mother Monster fans. Sign up and receive your special Lady Gaga edition iPad in time for the Holidays! For contest rules and registration visit the link below."

The offending message on Twitter read:

"Monsters, I'm giving away FREE iPad2's to each one of you in the spirit of the holidays :) Go to ___ to receive one!"

Once the attack was addressed and offending messages removed, Gaga tweeted:

"Phew. The hacking is over! And just in time, I'm on my way to Japan! So excited to spend Xmastime with my TokyoMonsters!"

Graham Cluley of security company Sophos blogged that while the upside of hitting Gaga's pages is that she is super popular, the downside is that she's so popular such a scam is quickly identified as such.

Websense, on its security blog, noted that #stophackinggaga became a trending topic during the hack.

In June, two German men were sentenced in a Duisberg court for hacking computers containing material belonging to Lady Gaga, Dr. Dre and other musicians, stealing their banking data and accessing e-mail accounts. 

Follow Bob on Twitter at www.twitter.com/alphadoggs

IDG News Service contributed to this report

Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.

Nominations for the 2012 ARN IT Industry Awards open on Tuesday, June 12.

More about: BBC, Facebook, IDG, LAN, Monster, Monsters, Sophos, Websense
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Tags: BBC, Facebook, Facebook security, free ipad2 scam, Lady Gaga hack, security, sophos, twitter, Twitter security, websense
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