What happened to other people. And the lesson.

Security firm CloudSEK documented a campaign in which attackers sent 500 to 1,000 phishing emails per sending account, posing as brands with "collaboration proposals" and "marketing opportunities." Payloads were hosted on trusted platforms such as OneDrive and disguised as contracts and briefs, tailored by channel size and content type.

Bitdefender Labs tracked more than 9,000 malicious livestreams on hijacked YouTube channels. Attackers used fake sponsorship emails to steal session cookies, bypass two-factor, remove managers, hide videos, rebrand channels to impersonate companies and public figures, and stream deepfake "double your crypto" giveaways. Australian broadcaster 7News reported its own channel hijacked for AI-generated Musk streams.

A lawsuit alleges hackers compromised digital accounts and devices belonging to photographers and producers who worked with the artist, obtaining 45 unreleased songs in 2023 that were later leaked, and in 2024 used a lookalike Gmail address and domain impersonating a photographer to obtain unreleased photos from a digital technician. The complaint says material was sold on the dark web.

Federal prosecutors charged an Austin, Texas man with hacking a producer's social media account and privately messaging artists to send unreleased tracks to a fake email address incorporating the producer's name, and with hacking two music management companies. More than 50 gigabytes of music, some unreleased, was allegedly taken and leaked.

The FBI and NCAA warned that athletes' public profiles, rosters, schedules and NIL activity make them targets for cyber-enabled sexual exploitation. Attackers personalize phishing, impersonate schools and platform support, and escalate friendly conversations into extortion. The FBI's IC3 logged more than 75,000 sextortion submissions in 2025.

The FBI's 2024 Internet Crime Report logged 982 SIM-swap complaints and roughly $26 million in losses, down from $72 million in 2022, while the UK fraud body Cifas reported a more than tenfold surge in unauthorized SIM swaps. A swapped number is rarely the end goal; it is the key used to reset email, intercept codes and drain accounts.