Hackers took control of the official Burger King Twitter account today and changed the name and profile picture to McDonalds. They even went to the trouble of using the same header image as the official McDonalds account. The hacker(s) then set about delivering a stream of bizarre messages, the first of which made it clear a takeover was in play: “We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you @DFNCTSC.” The @post is a reference to the teen hacker collective The Defonic Crew Team Screen Name Club, who hacked Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick account in 2005. Hackers Anonymous also got a mention.
The fact that it is Presidents Day, a US public holiday, probably largely explains the fast food giant’s failure to take control of the situation. It took over an hour for the account to be taken out of the hands of the hacker. During that time the tweets carried on coming including @posts and links to various rap artists including several references to Chieff Keeff a teenage rapper from Chicago. The account also gained nearly 20,000 to take it past the 100,000 mark by the time Twitter suspended the account. If and when it is reinstated Burger King will have a significantly bigger social media community thanks to the hack.
Throughout the crisis McDonalds stayed silent on their own Twitter feed, but when after the account went down they tweeted in burger bar social solidarity: “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”
If you missed it here is a screen grab from the height of the social media interception.
Click the image for a larger version where you can read the tweets.
PR and the Social Web 
It will be interesting to see whether the new followers gained by the Burger King Twitter Feed during the hack now stay with it as ‘normal service’ is resumed.