There have been quite a few hacks of social media accounts belonging to prominent sports and sports media figures over the last while, and the latest one there appears to involve Denver Broncos’ guard Netani Muti. On Tuesday, for a few hours, Muti’s Twitter account changed to a display name of “Elon Musk” (notable, considering Musk’s active takeover bid for Twitter), with a profile photo of Musk. And that account from Muti (seen above in a Dec. 2021 profile shot) put out some tweets seemingly supporting Musk’s stances:
https://twitter.com/NickKendellMHH/status/1516484548535586822
Some of what’s interesting here is that beyond that particular tweet and profile name and avatar change, Muti’s Twitter account has put out a lot of spam tweets over the past 24 hours, including numerous variations on repeated tweets “Even some of the best AI software engineers in the world don’t realize how advanced Tesla AI has become” and “Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle. Even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic!”
It’s not particularly clear why anyone would choose a Denver Broncos’ guard as a hacking target, or why their end goal after that hacking would be “send out a bunch of obviously-fake tweets,” but that does appear to be what happened here. And it is interesting to see how that played out.
[Netani Muti on Twitter; image from Jay Biggerstaff/USA Today Sports]