Twitter accounts get hacked all the time. Most of the time it is a random user whose account gets turned an unwitting spam bot. But sometimes it’s a big brand and the results can range from catastrophic to hilarious.
The latter has just happened to fast food chain Burger King’s Twitter account. Around noon EST today, Burger King’s account was hacked, and whoever took it over promptly announced that Burger King had sold itself to McDonald’s. The hackers changed the Burger King avatar logo to that of McDonald’s and have been on a hilarious rampage ever since.
The hack appears have been perpetrated by members associated online “hacktivist” group Anonymous. Tweets are being signed with the tag @DFNCTSC, which stands for “Defonic Team Screen Name Club.” A teenage hacker in the @DFNCTSC group pled guilt to hacking Paris Hilton in 2009 and was sentenced to 11 months in a juvenile corrections facility. It is often difficult to tell if malicious hackers are members of Anonymous or not as the group has little centralized structure and primarily communicates with the world through a variety of Twitter accounts.
Whoever has hacked Burger King posted the tweet below, telling people to follow @YourAnonNews, the primary news account for the group and calling the Burger King hack #OpMadCow.
The hackers seem to be enjoying themselves. The @BurgerKing account is retweeting nearly any mention of the hack it can find while mentioning a variety of hip hop recording artists in its tweets.
At the time of publication, Burger King had not yet reclaimed control over its Twitter account. One Twitter user noted that the Burger King hack may not really be such a bad thing overall as it elevates Burger King into the national conversation, even if it is for a horribly embarrassing incident. Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Update: The Burger King account was suspended by Twitter around 1:35 p.m. EST.
