Hacker takes over Burger King Twitter account

Unknown hacker uses Burger King Twitter account to tweet that the chain was sold to McDonalds and putting a McDonalds logo on the account's background picture. Hacking of Burger King account follows several cybersecurity breaches at corporations. ?

By Candice Choi and Joshua Freed,?AP Business Writers / February 18, 2013

This frame grab taken Monday, Feb. 18, 2013, shows Burger King's Twitter account after it was hacked, changing the fast-foot company's Twitter picture to a McDonald's logo and tweeting (falsely) that that it had been sold to rival McDonald's.

AP

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Somebody hacked?Burger?King's?Twitter account on Monday, posting obscene messages and changing its profile picture to a McDonald's logo.

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The tweets stopped after a little more than an hour, and?Burger?King?said it had reached out to Twitter to suspend the account. A Twitter spokesman did not immediately respond to a phone message left on Monday.

Burger?King, which usually tweets several times a week, said it was working to get the account back up. Typical tweets promoted sales on chicken sandwiches, or asked how many bites it takes to eat a chicken nugget.

But just after noon EST (1700 GMT) on Monday, someone tweeted via?Burger?King's?account, "We just got sold to McDonalds!" They also changed the icon to rival McDonald Corp.'s golden arches and the account's background picture to McDonald's new Fish McBites.

About 55 tweets and retweets followed over the next hour and a quarter, including some that contained racial epithets, references to drug use and obscenities. The account tweeted: "if I catch you at a wendys, we're fightin!"

Monday's appropriation of?Burger?King's?Twitter account was a relatively mild example of cybersecurity problems, which are causing increasing concern in Washington and for industry. Media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have all said this year that their computer systems were breached, while several NBC websites were briefly hacked in November. White House officials and some lawmakers are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for the government and industry to share information on how to defend against hacking.

Burger?King?didn't know who hacked the account, and no other social media accounts were affected, said Bryson Thornton, a spokesman for Miami-based?Burger?King?Worldwide Inc. Its social media team and an outside agency manage the Twitter account, but Thornton declined to say how many people knew the account's password. He said they hope to have it working again soon, and will post a statement on Facebook later Monday apologizing for the tweets.

Twitter acknowledged on Feb. 1 that cyber attackers may have stolen user names and passwords of 250,000 users. It said at the time that it notified users of the breach.

Competitors were sympathetic.

McDonald's responded on Twitter that it empathized with its?Burger?King?counterparts. "Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking."

"My real life nightmare is playing out" on?Burger?King's?twitter feed, wrote Wendy's social media worker Amy Rose Brown.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/9pHPJRVwgN8/Hacker-takes-over-Burger-King-Twitter-account

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