Last Monday the Burger King Twitter account was
hacked (and a few hours later Jeep was hacked too). Not too much of a surprise
really as these days is quite easy to manipulate online data.
Obviously someone managed to hack the account
and started to tweet promoting BK’s rival McDonald’s and insulting followers.
Even the main image of the account was changed showing Mc Donald’s Fish
McBites.
The hacker also had fun by posting other stuff such
as the tweets and images below.
This lasted for about an hour after which the
account was suspended. A few hours later the account was back to normal but it
definitely costed a lot to BK in terms of reputation as many followers probably
had not realised what was happening. However this hack created a big buzz and
the number of followers increased from 83k 110k within an hour, not to mention
that the story was covered by all sort of media.
Of course McDonald’s had nothing to do with it and
tweeted the following:
So
someone at MTV had the brilliant idea to pull a hack stunt to raise awareness of a BET
(MTV’s sister network) live event in Los Angeles and, of course, gain more
followers. MTV and BET pretended the same kind of hacking was happening to
their accounts by switching profile photos and logos. MTV became BET, and vice
versa.
There were some marked differences between the
hacks of Burger King and Jeep when compared with MTV. MTV soon admitted it was
just a marking stunt but many fans really did not like that.
What’s Twitter saying about all this? It has been silent on the
episodes, aside from some well-timed password advice. If you recall a quarter
million account passwords were compromised earlier this month so I’d assume
Twitter isn't too happy about it. Twitter, unlike Google and Amazon
for instance, still doesn't support two-factor authentication, the
app-and-password-based security, and it can be an easy target.
Real or fake, these hacks are a public reminder...if a brand wants
to protect itself against the next hacking, what should it do?
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