As if it isn't embarrassing enough for a company to have its official Twitter account compromised, sometimes hackers like to add insult to injury. On Monday, a post on the official (and verified) Twitter account for Burger King declared that the fast-food chain "just got sold to McDonalds!"
The Twitter account was renamed "McDonalds" and the profile image was changed to the iconic golden arches. The account description? "Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped ..." After the "announcement," a stream of tweets and retweets followed, making light of the situation. Based on retweets between @YourAnonNews, a Twitter account associated with Anonymous, and the compromised @BurgerKing account, it appears as if the hacktivist group is behind the hack.
Twitter suspended the account about an hour after the first compromised tweet.
We reached out to Twitter and Burger King for an explanation as to what efforts are being made to reinstate Burger King's control of the Twitter account. A Twitter spokesperson responded with a standard explanation that the social network doesn't "comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons."
"This incident has nothing to do with us," a McDonald's spokesperson told NBC News, dismissing the question of an acquisition (and making plain that it wasn't to blame for the social media mess, either). "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking," a tweet laterposted through the official McDonald's Twitter account further emphasized.
No matter. The Internet's getting a kick out of the whole incident. "The fact that @BurgerKing got hacked and turned into a @McDonalds feed is pretty funny," one Twitter user wrote. "Never know what is going to happen in social media."
"Somebody needs to tell Burger King that 'whopper123' isn't a secure password," another quipped.
A social media specialist for Wendy's, Amy Rose Brown, tweeted (on her personal account), that her "real life nightmare is playing out over on @BurgerKing."
It's not all bad news for Burger King, though. As toy review site OAFE tweeted: "They may be hacked, but when was the last time ANYBODY talked about @BurgerKing this much?" Indeed, the Twitter account gained some 30,000 new followers before the account suspension.
Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.
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