I’m Lovin’ It: Burger King’s Twitter Feed Hacked

Spence Cooper
February 21, 2013

I’m Lovin’ It: Burger King’s Twitter Feed Hacked The Twitter account @BurgerKing was hacked and its logo, profile page, and account name were changed to look as though it belonged to their rival McDonald’s. The hackers announced that the Burger King chain had been sold to McDonalds.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the hackers claim to be a part of the LulzSec group, which since 2011 has compromised several high-profile targets including Sony and a number of government agencies.

The Daily Dot reports the group claiming credit for this hack is @DFNCTSC (short for “Defonic Team Screen Name Club”). DFNCTSC was also responsible for hacking Paris Hilton’s cell phone in 2005, releasing nude photos of the star online.

“One of the group’s alleged members, 17 years old at the time, pleaded guilty to participating in the hack. In Sept. 2005, he was sentenced to 11 months in a juvenile facility, plus 2 years of supervised release, where he was banned from using the Internet. Because he was a juvenile at the time, the hacker was never publicly named.”

Network World claims the juvenile was part of a loosely organized group of about 8 to 12 hackers which hacked into a number of computer networks, according to a security expert who was contacted by the group.

“These kind of kids, they come and go,” said Jack Koziol, program manager with Infosec Institute. “They put one of them in juvenile hall, there are 500 to replace them the next day.”

Another recent hacked Twitter account was @Jeep’s Twitter page that included a graphic header announcing that the Chrysler division had been sold to Cadillac.

The bogus content added to Jeep’s Twitter feed was similar to that used in the burger breach, and included vulgar tweets and a photo of a person shooting up drugs in a bathroom with the caption: “We caught one of our employees in the bathroom doing this…”

CSO Online claims the fake content was displayed on the Jeep site for around 80 minutes before Chrysler regained control of its account and purged the unauthorized material.

Jeep tweeted it was back in charge: “Hacking: Definitely not a #Jeep thing. We’re back in the driver’s seat!”

The Burger King and Jeep hijacks should be a wake up call for Twitter, said Chris Heuer, chairman and founder of the Social Media Club, a global organization for media makers.

“This should push Twitter to deploy two-factor authentication,” he said, and added that passwords alone aren’t secure enough to protect online accounts.

“With all the personal information people are sharing publicly, all it requires is a little ingenuity to guess a person’s password.

“Twitter needs to take action on this to protect users,” he said, “and ultimately, to protect its own reputation.”