social media risk management Archives - John Sileo, Cyber Security Training

Jeep jacked and Burger King busted as company Twitter feeds get hacked

So far, 2013 has been the Year of the Hack, as the past few weeks have proven positively lousy with big-name security breaches.

Social networks, news outlets, and now…jeeps and fast food? That’s right, recent events have seen two prominent businesses get their Twitter accounts hacked, and worse. Not only did identity pirates shanghai the feeds (and therefore the reputations) of Burger King and Jeep, they used this illegal access to send embarrassing and scandalous messages to their followers.

Last Monday, @BurgerKing began tweeting that it had been sold to McDonalds, changing its image to a golden arches logo and posting ridiculous, wildly provocative comments about rappers and mad cow disease. The same thing happened to Jeep the next day, when its account claimed it had been sold to Cadillac and that its CEO had been fired for doing drugs.

Employee Live-Tweets Her Firing From Company Account (Ouch)

Let’s start with a tip today. If you fire your company’s social media manager, you might want to disable their access to the business’ official Twitter account first – and every other social media platform, too.

British company HMV learned that lesson the hard way when an employee live-tweeted her firing. Here are some of the tweets she sent out from the company’s Twitter handle before her access was shut off:

“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!!!”
“There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring”

In another amusing twist – amusing at least to everyone but HMV management – the employee tweeted that she overheard the company’s marketing director ask “How do I shut down Twitter?”.

Data security dealt another body blow as Twitter gets hacked

About 250,000 Twitter accounts may have been hacked last week. Was yours one of them?

On Friday, the company announced via its official blog that it has reset the passwords for those users after a breach was detected in which email addresses, usernames and encrypted password data may have been accessed by hackers.

The blog post was quick to point out that other companies such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have recently fallen victim to data security breaches as well, though those attacks appear to have been state-sponsored (check back here tomorrow for more on those breaches).

There has been no indication as of yet that the infiltration of Twitter was related to those incidents. However, Bob Lord, the company’s director of information security and author of the blog post, said he does not believe this was an isolated event, and that the attack was sophisticated and not “not the work of amateurs.”