Burger King has become the latest high-profile brand to fall prey to hackers, as its Twitter account was hijacked, resulting in its logo being switched to McDonalds and a tirade of offense tweets being sent out to its followers.
Burger King’s Twitter account was used to tweet messages promoting rival McDonalds, which some posts said had bought the company, while other posts contained racial slurs, obscenities and references to drugs.
The fast food chain’s Twitter feed was filled with McDonald’s promotions and golden arches were inserted into the account’s masthead.
Following the hack, Burger King suspended its Twitter account and would post an apology on its Facebook page.
McDonalds has tweeted: “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”
The news comes two weeks after Twitter reset 250,000 account passwords after a hacker attack on its systems the week before .
Twitter reset the passwords of 0.13% of its users as a precaution because of uncertainty about whether or not hackers had accessed the encrypted passwords of account holders.
Days after Twitter admitted the breach, it emerged the microblogging service planned to strengthen its login security with two-factor authentication.
The move is aimed at making it impossible for hackers to break into accounts, even if they obtain user passwords.
Following the hijack of the Burger King twitter account, John Monks, Head of Social Business Design at global marketing and technology agency LBi, believes part of the fast food giants problems are as a result of not embracing social media at the business DNA level.
“Burger King like other major brands is not embracing social media at a ‘business DNA’ level. They need to be structurally able to put social at the heart of their business to a) reap the benefits b) ensure that when something goes wrong they can respond in seconds rather than hours.
“Brands who treat digital and social on a par with other media channels/areas of their business have a disaster recovery scenario to prevent incidents like this happening,” Monks said.
