Burger King Recovers Twitter Account After Hack

Burger King was left a little red faced yesterday, when hackers took over its Twitter account, changed the name to rival McDonald’s and posted all sorts of nonsense.

The logo was changed to the classic McDonald’s ‘M’ too, with a message claiming Burger King had been sold to McDonald’s “because the Whopper flopped”.

The account was initially suspended, as the fast food chain worked with Twitter to delete the naughty messages.

Twitter account recovered

Burger King has now wrested control of the Twitter account back from the hackers. “Interesting day here at BURGER KING®, but we’re back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!” a message on its Twitter feed read this morning.

In a message sent to media, the company added: “We apologise to our followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.”

McDonald’s, perhaps speaking with its tongue firmly in its cheek, tweeted it had nothing to do with the hacking.

No one knows who was responsible for the hack.

Some believe Twitter account hijacking is only bad news for the micro-blogging service. “If these types of exploit continue to happen on such a regular basis, it would be a safe bet to assume that big brands will lose trust in Twitter,” said Sam Garrity, director of digital marketing agency RocketMill.

It was only this month that Twitter told quarter of a million of its users to change their passwords as hackers had managed to get their mitts on authentication data.

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Thomas Brewster

Tom Brewster is TechWeek Europe's Security Correspondent. He has also been named BT Information Security Journalist of the Year in 2012 and 2013.

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