Burger King hasn't been "having their way" (Get it? Get it?) over the past few days, as hackers have a heyday with the fast food giant's Twitter account. Hackers gained control over the @BugerKing twitter account and rebranded it to appear as McDonalds, complete with the Golden Arches logo in the avatar. Then, hilarity ensued.
With the BURGER KING® brand defaced, and hackers posting offensive tweets and claiming the company was bought by their fast food competitor, you'd imagine throats are being choked in the PR department. Whether their Twitter password was 'whopper123' or the Hamburglar has taken a foray into the world of hacking, the result was a PR nightmare (or dream depending on how you look at it.)
As a business owner, this is the last thing you want to come into work and deal with - brand confusion and security issues can cause a lot of problems that can affect your bottom line. Keeping secure, unique passwords, changing your passwords frequently, and being extremely careful about sharing account credentials with other sites and services is very important.
Twitter, while definitely a powerful social network for marketing and communicating alike, is also known for being a little informal, to say the least. Thanks to this, the mishap wasn't all that bad for Burger King. In the first 30 minutes of the hack, @BurgerKing earned over 5,000 new followers, with more coming due to the publicity of the event. On top of that, BKW stocks haven't exactly taken a plunge from the event. The account is now back in the hands of its rightful owners with all of the offensive content removed.
Don't take a chance with insecure passwords, you might not be so lucky.
