Yesterday Burger King turned into McDonalds. Today, Jeep has become Cadillac. It's a bad week to be on Twitter.
In what appears to be something very similar to yesterday's Burger King hack, Jeep is now saying they were taken over by Cadillac. Looks like most of the tweets coming out of Jeep's new account are quite interesting. 


Jeep is gaining hundreds, if not thousands of followers from the hack, much like Burger King did yesterday. We're not sure who is behind it, but it is either the same people that hacked the BK account or some similar copycat that isn't quite as creative.
The tweets also aren't flowing as quickly as they did yesterday, so maybe this one is already getting shut down. 
UPDATE: Jeep's Head of Jeep Brand Communications Todd Goyer told us "We're aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible."
It appears that the Twitter might actually be getting back to normal and no longer running super wild. The Cadillac background has been removed and we haven't seen a tweet in nearly 20 minutes. It does still have the Caddy crest though.
SEXPAND
UPDATE 2: Our friends at Gizmodo noticed this one:


Burger King's Twitter account hacked, made to look like McDonald's

Burger King Twitter
Burger King fell victim to a hack Monday and had its Twitter account altered to look as if it belonged to McDonald's. (Twitter)

By Salvador RodriguezThis post has been updated. See the note below for details.
February 18, 2013, 10:28 a.m.

Hackers have taken over Burger King's Twitter account and changed it to look like it belongs to McDonald's. The account's profile photo has been changed to the McDonald's logo, and the cover photo and background have been changed to images of McDonald's food.
The account appears to have been taken over Monday morning, when hackers tweeted out "We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you."
The hackers also clarified that "For the record, our password was not "whopper" or anything!"
Burger King last seemed to be in control of the account on Sunday, and as of this writing, its Facebook and Google+ accounts are still under control. Burger King could not be reached for comment.
The hackers claim to be a part of the LulzSec group, which since 2011 has gone after a number of high-profile targets including Sony and several government agencies.
Based on a tweet retweeted by the account, it appears the group may have waited for Presidents Day to pull off the hack in order to catch the company on a day its employees may be not working.
[Update 11:13 a.m. Feb. 18: Burger King's Twitter account has been suspended by the social network and is no longer visible.]

Burger King Twitter Account Hacked


The Huffington Post  |  By 

This is exactly why you don't give the Hamburglar your Twitter password...
Someone apparently hacked Burger King's Twitter account on Monday and changed its photo to the McDonald's logo and name "McDonalds." The hacker then claimed Burger King was sold to McDonald's, and then posted a host of raunchy messages.
The account's bio was also changed to: "Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[ FREDOM IS FAILURE."
The perpetrator referenced several internet hacker groups, including LulzSec, Anonymous and DFNTSC.
About an hour after the wayward tweets began, the fast food chain's account was suspended. A company spokesman told the AP that they reached out to Twitter to have the account frozen.
According to BuzzFeed, Burger King released the following statement:
It has come to our attention that the Twitter account of the BURGER KING® brand has been hacked. We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings. We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.
Here are a few screenshots for posterity:
burger king hacked
burger king
bk

Donald Trump's Twitter Hacked, Raunchy Lil Wayne Lyrics Posted
by Rebecca Macatee
Donald Trump, Lil WayneIsaac Brekken/Getty Images, Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
Donald Trump has posted some strange things on Twitter.
But Thursday, the Celebrity Apprentice star really surprised his 2 million followers when someone hacked his account and tweeted a raunchy Lil Wayne lyric.
"These hoes think they classy, well that's the class I'm skippen," the Trumpster (actually, his hacker) wrote, quoting a rap line from "Scream & Shout." Sadly,  Trump almost immediately deleted the tweet after it posted.
"My Twitter has been seriously hacked---and we are looking for the perpetrators," he wrote.
He then took a dig at the social networking site, writing, "Twitter will soon be irrelevant if lowlifes are so easily able to hack into accounts."
But by Friday morning, Trump seemed back to his old tricks, tweeting his fears of China "overtaking" the world and calling for the death penalty for Drew Peterson.

Find the McDonald's/Burger King hack funny? Just imagine full-blown corporate cyberwar

Summary: At the time, I thought what happened to Burger King on Twitter yesterday was pretty funny. But do we need to think about what behavior we're condoning?
By  for Post-PC Developments 
Last weekend I took a DNA sample using using the 23andMe service. I went onto a website, gave them my credit card details, and a test kit turned up a couple of days later. I spat in the tube (sorry!), put it on a plane (well, DHL did that for me) and soon they'll put it in a machine and sequence my genome.
Where that gets all crazy future sci-fi is that once that's done I can download a copy of my genome, on a small handheld computer, pretty much wherever on the planet I am. I could be in line to get a coffee on the way to work. And if I want to understand something more, I can tap into essentially the totality of human knowledge to help me understand what I'm actually seeing. Finally, this all comes at a cost that is essentially free.
When I was a kid I used to read a lot of sci-fi. All of that could have been lifted from the sort of cyberpunk books I used to read 20 years ago.
And that got me to thinking about the McDonald's/Burger King hack that happened yesterday. Although we know that particular hack was the result of a hacker/some hackers exploiting some weakness, it shows the ability for individuals to co-opt a marketing channel, which is something that would be very hard to do with "traditional" marketing. If McDonald's rented a billboard, it would be hard in real life to corrupt that arrangement so that the placed advert was actually for Burger King.
But in a digital world, that becomes much easier. If McDonald's rented digital billboard, hackers could easily do what they did yesterday with Twitter -- i.e. exploit some weakness to replace the McDonald's advert with a Burger King advert. I've been in McDonald's where all the menus were electronic display panels -- why not hack into those and replace those with messages about where the nearest Burger King is?
If you were writing a cyberpunk novel, rather than having some ad hoc collective of hackers doing it "for the lulz", you'd possibly have the marketing team at Burger King employing freelance hackers to corrupt McDonald's advertising intentionally for their own gain. (Lawyers -- please relax at this point! I'm not suggesting that McDonald's or Burger King, or any of your clients would actually do this, I'm just playing with an idea that's 100% science fiction.)
That idea could have been lifted straight out of the opening chapters of Snow Crash.

Change

This idea seems ridiculous, but could we could end up in a situation where corporate executives are intentionally acting outside of legality and morality in a sort of "war" with competitors to take advantage of the each others advertising spend and spin it to their own advantage? I present two points:
Firstly, sometimes corporate executives act outside of legal and generally accepted moral boundaries. (Again, lawyers! I'm not suggesting that your clients would do this.)
Secondly, it appeared to me that everyone thought that what happened to Burger King yesterday was amusing. I must admit, I thought it was funny -- it's part of basic human psychology to get an emotional buzz out of schadenfreude, but this morning I'm wondering whether it actually was funny.
I did a very quick, non-scientific analysis of Twitter sentiment about the hack this morning. I looked up synonyms for "funny", and synonyms for "bad", and used search.twitter.com to find tweets that referenced both sets. I didn't find one example of people lamenting what had happened to Burger King. Every tweet that I read was full-on schadenfreude.
Some of this is down to the fact that Twitter is naturally a medium that skews towards humour. The likely reason for this is that humour acts in our society as a type of "social grease". If you're out and about with a group of people that you know well, a "good night" is one where you're laughing, joking and teasing throughout. Humour is part of what we use to get to know each other. Twitter's ultra-short burst message design makes humour more important. A quick and witty tweet that conveys humour is more likely to be picked up and propagated in the network than one that is negative. Here's one that I particularly liked from yesterday, because of it's knowing nod towards computer security:

Screen Shot 2013-02-19 at 14.33.19
You have to admit that this is pretty funny.

Problem?

OK, but is what happened to Burger King actually funny, or are we just not thinking about what we're doing? Most human social behaviour has been under development and refinement for hundreds of years. A friend of mine said to me recently "we're taught to behave everywhere except the internet, which is now everywhere". Were we all correct to give oxygen to the hacker/hackers who did this? (For example, I retweeted the tweet I've reproduced above yesterday without thinking about. I read it, thought it was clever and funny, and hit "retweet".)
Not wishing to be a killjoy -- I present these a "devil's advocate" argument purely as a disinterested discussion point, but providing feedback to those involved that what they did as funny is rather a "win" for whoever did it. If we all condemned what happened and didn't play the game, it would make a repeat performance less likely. We might also want to reflect that it could have been our spouse working in Burger King's marketing department yesterday desperately trying to find some way of contacting Twitter to get the account knocked offline. (An activity that's essentially impossible unless you happen to personally know someone senior within Twitter.) And someone could well have lost their job. Regardless of what happened, that's a rubbish day.
Another point is that it actually worked. The Burger King account managed to grab an additional 25,000 followers in the couple of hours the hack was active. At the time of writing, it was up about another 25,000. If someone targcyeted you with doubling your Twitter followers from 60,000 to 120,000-odd, if a hacker told you he/she had a plan, it'd be a little bumpy but that it could be done in a day if you had a little cash -- well, how's your moral compass?
read more at http://www.zdnet.com

Anonymous Hacked By Rival Hacker Collective

By  ·
Anonymous Hacked By Rival Hacker Collective

Over the past few days, a number of high profile brands and people have had their Twitter accounts hacked. Burger King was the first to fall victim to the hacks with Donald Trump’s personal account following a day later. Now the latest victim is connected with the group responsible for the hacks.
BBC News reports that the popular Anonymous Central Twitter (@Anon_Central) was hacked by a rival hacker group known as Rustle League. The Twitter feed was forced down, and now the account is starting from scratch.

While this was going on, most of the dramas was taking place on the fellow @Anon_CentralTwitter. Some were saying that a fight between rival hacker collectives was wonderfully entertaining, but most were asking the two groups to work together instead of fighting amongst themselves.

Of course, some people find the idea of Anonymous getting hacked to be scary in and of itself:
It should be noted that not all hackers are related to Anonymous, and some really hate Anonymous. In this case, it seems that Rustle League was in it for the “lulz.” There might be cases in the future, however, where rival hacker collectives take things to serious new levels by posting personal information on those involved in each group. For hackers veiled in anonymity, that would be the worst possible thing.