Burger King, Jeep & MTV Twitter Hacked: Who’s Next?

With the recent news of Burger King being hacked, followed by Jeep and MTV – we find ourselves wondering who’s next?

Incase you’re not familiar with the scenario, we’ll break it down for you:

Burger King Twitter Hack

The Damage

The hacker took over the account, changed the display picture to the McDonald’s logo, and posted some of the following tweets (Image via):

It was revealed that BK’s password was “whopper” (creative right?). Burger King later acknowledged the rogue tweets:

Interesting day here at BURGER KING®, but we're back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!

— BurgerKing (@BurgerKing) February 19, 2013

and released the following statement to media:

“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.”

The good news? Burger King saw a jump of 100,000 followers over the course of the day. Is it worth the headache? Time will tell!

Jeep Twitter Hack

The Damage

The hacker posted odd tweets, including mentioning luxury brand, Cadillac. The account has since been tamed, but looked something like this (Image via):

Cadillac later responded to ensure tweeps they were not involved:

Just to clarify, Cadillac is not connected to the hack of the @Jeep Twitter account.

— Cadillac (@Cadillac) February 19, 2013

MTV Twitter Hack

The Damage:

The hacker made promises to return Jersey Shore, changed the brand logo to BET, and continued on a wild tweeting rampage (Image via):

UPDATE: Reports are saying that MTV hacked their own twitter in promotion of their new show, Hacked. Good one, MTV..

1. Change your passwords regularly. And change them to something obscure that has nothing to do with the product you sell. Random numbers, letters, and symbols are your best friend. We change our passwords every month—that will probably change to every two weeks in light of this development.

2. Have procedures in place to stop an attack in its tracks. Create a fail-proof social escalation policy that can end something like this before it gets out of hand. Have the assets you need on hand to be able to restore the images on your profile.

3. Minimize the number of mobile devices that can access the account. If you look at all the apps that can access your account, you should know for certain where they’re all coming from and what their purpose is. If you’re unsure about any of them, ax them.

4. Make it mandatory that any mobile phones that link to corporate accounts are password protected. That way, if you leave your phone at, say, a Burger King and you’re signed into your brand’s account, no one can have easy access to it. Similarly, make sure that if you leave your computer at, say, a Burger King, it’s not logged into any accounts. Password protect everything that allows access to accounts that are password protected. Thinking about the computer I’m typing on, if I were to leave it somewhere and some swarthy character logged onto Facebook, they would be able to wreak havoc on about six different accounts (none of which are my personal account). That’s pretty scary when you think about it.

5. Change your passwords every time someone leaves the company—whether or not it’s amicable. Don’t trust people. There’s too much at stake here.

If you had to guess, which brand do you think is next – or do you think the hacker is done their dirty work?

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