Singer Taylor Swift is urging her friends to tighten up their online security to keep the hackers away.

She was horrified when her colleagues were exposed to the world in August after cyber-crooks hacked into cloud storage devices belonging to 100 stars and stole private photographs, often including topless or naked images.

Swift has always been wary of putting too much trust in technology, and now she is warning other stars to be more careful to avoid a repeat of the celebrity hacking scandal, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

She tells British newspaper The Sun: "There's a really dark side of humanity and a very dark corner of the Internet, and they know that the most value will be if they can take down someone who is really doing good things... What I think is interesting - and by interesting I mean really terrifying - is how much of our technology we don't understand. To me, if I don't quite understand how something works, I'm sceptical of it...

"All you can do is try your best to protect yourself. At a certain point you have to stop thinking about it because if I think about it too much I don't like the reality of the situation. There could be someone right now trying to hack into my email,` she added.