Basically, we go on the Internet to be entertained.
Only every once in a while do we expect to learn things.
This week, we were purely amused by the fiasco that happened on Burger King’s Twitter page. It was the best and most hilarious thing. The hack lasted more than an hour before the account belonging to the burger “restaurant” was suspended, according to a BuzzFeed article.
Burger King released this statement: “It has come to our attention that the Twitter account of the BURGER KING® brand has been hacked. We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings. We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.”
It seems like the hacker group Anonymous was responsible for the attack. Giant companies like this shouldn’t have such poor security that they can be hacked so easily and for such a sustained amount of time.
That was Monday. On Tuesday, Jeep’s official Twitter account was hacked by the same group.
“The same people who pulled off a hour-long hijacking of Burger King’s account yesterday have struck again, this time taking over Jeep’s official Twitter feed,” reported BuzzFeed’s John Herrman, who also covered the Burger King hack. “The posts are similar in nature: shoutouts to the same handful of Twitter users, including @lilinternet and @dfntsc, and there are links to many of the same pictures and videos as yesterday.”
When Burger King’s account was suspended, it gained 30,000 more followers than it had before the hacking started. So, did the hacks just reward fast-food establishments by gaining them more Twitter followers? There didn’t appear to be a political agenda behind the attacks, but maybe it was a commentary on consumerism.
“Earlier today, our official BK Twitter Account was compromised by unauthorized users. Upon learning of this incident, our social media teams immediately began working with Twitter security administrators to suspend the compromised account until we could re-establish our brand’s official Twitter page,” said Bryson Thornton, director of global communications at Burger King, in a statement to the Associated Press.
Thornton is most likely evaluating how the company’s social media accounts are run. If major corporations can be hacked for funsies relatively easily, then we should all take a look at our multiple accounts’ privacy settings. Your password is probably a lot easier to guess than a humongous company’s password. Anonymous may not have you on its radar, but never piss off an ex or a former best friend or anyone. It’s too easy to ruin someone’s reputation online these days.
McDonald’s tweeted about Burger King’s plight and said, “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”
Thank goodness. There are only so many “they DIDN’T have it their way” jokes we can make.
