Burger King Not Sold to McDonalds, Just Lost Twitter Account

Burger King`s Twitter account was suspended on Monday after falling into the wrong hands and allowing an unauthorized party to post hateful, obscene and false messages about the Miami-based fast-food chain.

The profile picture of the company was also altered to show an alleged merger between Burger King and McDonalds. For approximately an hour, the prankster behind this action displayed on behalf of Burger King a series of inappropriate postings that reached tens of thousands of the company`s Twitter followers.

The unidentified attacker posted, among other 55 nonsensical messages, the controversial “We just got sold to McDonalds!” tweet, producing confusion among those receiving the announcement. Apparently behind this stunt is the hacktivist group Anonymous that claimed the deed and included it into one of their campaigns dubbed #OpMadCow.

In a public apology, BK spokesman Bryson Thornton said: “Earlier today, our official BK Twitter Account was compromised by unauthorized users. Upon learning of this incident, our social media teams immediately began working with Twitter security administrators to suspend the compromised account until we could re-establish our brand’s official Twitter page. We apologize to our loyal fans and followers, whom might have received unauthorized tweets from our account. We are pleased to announce that the account is now active again.”

This year, apart from recent data breaches suffered by Twitter and Facebook, media channels such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post also fell victim to online attacks and unauthorized access to private internal data, raising concerns in Washington that only a few days ago decided on a new legislative framework that implies sharing intelligence between the US government and private sector to defend the economy, the people and other countries against the ever growing number of electronic threats.