A little friendly rivalry can be fun and generally never hurts anyone, as the case this weekend between fast food chains Burger King and McDonalds. Burger King’s official Twitter (News - Alert) account was hacked over the weekend, displaying the golden arches of one of its main competitors, McDonalds.
Burger King was the latest Twitter account to be hacked, as a quarter of a million users had their Twitter accounts hacked by a sophisticated scam in the past two weeks. Although Twitter was able to detect that live attack, the hackers did make away with usernames, e-mail addresses, sessions tokens and encrypted/salted versions of the passwords.
McDonalds has come right out and denied having anything to do with the attack tweeting; “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”
This particular attack seems to have been done all in fun as nothing inappropriate against Burger King was tweeted and presumably no sensitive information stolen.
Anonymous, having claimed responsibility for the prank after the fact, decided to have some fun with Burger King’s 85,000 followers by changing the official account name over to McDonalds. They also decided to change the account picture to promote one of McDonalds’ newest menu items, the Fish McBites.
Some of the tweets sent out from the compromised account were laced with profanity and were linked to several popular hip hop stars.
Burger King has since regained control of its account and has deleted the tweets in question. The fast food chain also tweeted out the following response; “Interesting day here at Burger King, but we're back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!"