As we covered this morning, there was a strange hack of Burger Kings’ Twitter over the weekend where photos of its main rivalry’s’ logo, McDonald, were published. But this wasn’t the end of a series of unfortunate events for Twitter. Jeep’s Twitter account was hacked later in the day as well, where messages were published saying that the company has been sold to its main rivalry, General Motors’s (GM) Cadillac.

One of the tweets from the hacked Twitter account said that there will be no more Jeep production because “we caught our CEO doing this…” with a link to a picture of a man doing illegal drugs, sharing some similarities with a post from Burger King about its employees.

These two publicized attacks on major rivalry companies in the auto and franchise industry have made us wonder: who are these hackers trying to hurt?

Earlier this month, Twitter reported a scam that affected 250,000 users, where usernames, e-mail addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of their passwords were stolen. However, it seems that this scam wasn’t enough to damage Twitters’ reputation, so hackers took to stealing the account of companies that are known around the world in order to garner this type of attention.

The increased mobility usage as well as the BYOD trend has brought to light the sensitive issue of security, as data brokers seems to be constantly stealing personal information – such as credit cards, home addresses, school addresses, online purchases and Internet browsing activities. Yes, of course, when combined with the most recent Twitter scam, this incident further highlights how vital it is for companies to protect their security.

“The Burger King and Jeep hacks of the last few days are malicious pranks that fortunately were so absurd they did not damage the reputation of either company.  Reality is the number, sophistication and frequency of hacks and other types of cyber attacks is accelerating," said Peter Bernstein, senior editor at TechZone360. "They highlight the need for constant vigilance. The ability to alter a corporate website were relatively benign and inconvenient for Burger King and Jeep. In many ways they were very lucky. These were just another reminder of how important a holistic look at online security as a key aspect of risk management has become.”

But with this most recent scam on Twitter, hackers are even going as far as defaming renowned companies in the industries, and it is time that the government step in and provide the digital world with the same guiding laws as US citizens.

It seems that without the proper set of updated laws in the industry designed to punish data brokers and hackers in the same way that criminals are punished, these types of scams will undoubtedly continue. If a person steals mail from their neighbor and obtains their personal information and sells it, it is considered a federal offense and will be prosecuted by the law.

The same legal process should be applied in the online world, as it seems to have become a replacement for our real life. Just because a crime is committed in an area of cloud space doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished.

The reason why people don’t run around committing crimes, (mostly because they have morals), is because they are scared of the potential punishment, which has proven a successful disciplinary method since the Hammurabi Codes thousands of years ago. Even though the hacker may have been caught, which according to Gizmodo is a DJ from England, the real issue at hand is not solved.

In order to put an end to these unnecessary Twitter hacks and threatening data broker scams, the government must step in and threaten these groups of people with the law, otherwise, there is no reason for them to stop torturing the public.