Hackers Turn Burger King’s Tweet Stream Into A Whopper Of A Mess

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/hackers-turn-burger-kings-tweet-stream-into-a-whopper-of-a-mess/

by coloneltcb • 13 years ago

77 45 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

Lightning• 13 years ago

Twitter suspended the account: https://twitter.com/burgerking

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

It jumped by 30k followers in a handful of minutes. Huge increases like that seem to trigger an automatic suspension.

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

The cynic in me would love to see this as a savvy marketing strategy! First time I've thought of BK in a long time, so I guess it worked! They should capitalize on their new dose of attention by giving away a "hacked" coupon on Twitter to get people into stores!

oh_god_why• 13 years ago

Ugh. Why would anyone waste their precious time creating an advertisement for McDonald's?

Unless...

chc• 13 years ago

Alternate way to frame the question: Why would a prankster alter a company's Web presence in a way that suggests they have experienced a hostile takeover by their biggest competitor?

gfodor4• 13 years ago

So these guys now are at risk of going to prison in order to create an advertisement for McDonalds and lots of buzz around Burger King. Somehow I don't think they thought this one through.

tatsuke952• 13 years ago

The fact that we can talk casually about people going to prison for what is essentially cyber-vandalism is so ridiculous I don't know what to think. These are weird times.

GauntletWizard• 13 years ago

Punishment should be proportional to the crime. When you do graffiti on the side of a Burger King, it's a few hundred dollars and two man-days to clean it off. In proportion, the fine should be 2-3x that cost, and maybe 2-3 days in county jail for the offenders.

With the economy of internet scale, that ramps up fairly quickly. How many people saw that vandalism? With your local McDonalds, it's probably a few hundred, a thousand on the outside. How many people follow @BurgerKing? It's probably more on the order of millions. Even using a logarithmic scale, there's an arguement to be made for months in prison. The cost of the offsetting advertising campaign? Who knows; They say "There's no such thing as bad publicity", but certainly some money is going to be spent cleaning up this mess; Probably again 2-3 orders of magnitude more than the cleanup of the local franchise.

gfodor4• 13 years ago

The prison-worthy crime is not the vandalism but the illegal access to Burger King's accounts and website. It's not illegal for you to deface Burger King's wikipedia page, after all.

zecho• 13 years ago

Part of me thinks this was another viral Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertisement.

sheraz• 13 years ago

I don't think CPB has had BK for a while [1]. Though I agree this could have been in Crispin's spirit.

[1] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/burger-king...

Steko• 13 years ago

Best thing that could happen to Burger King with the horse whoppers thing in the news.

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

McDonalds responded: https://twitter.com/McDonalds/status/303575465237549056

bmuon• 13 years ago

I love their use of "counterparts". It almost reads as "archenemies".

comrh• 13 years ago

Yay Hacktivism! Oh wait, this is childish and pointless.

mnicole• 13 years ago

The worst part about all of this - to me, anyway - is that they had the opportunity to be clever and funny about it and could have left it at the McDonald's-buys-BK PR stunt with continuing professional-sounding tweets, but instead they wasted their hijack by turning it into the exact flood of childish dribble that people expect when they think "hacker".

joezydeco2• 13 years ago

It sure appears that BK has been asleep at the wheel for a while now, especially after dropping their most recent ad firm. You're not going to get an Oreo/Poland Spring style response out of this.

I don't get what's happening to BK overall. Every McDonalds around me is either being torn down and rebuilt or fully remodeled with new facilities and new tech, while one BK in town has suddenly closed and the other has been decomposing from the inside out for the last 8 years.

stephengillie• 13 years ago

BK has been bought and sold many times over the years. Most recently, it was sold to 3G Capital from a group of Bain Capital, TPG Captial, and Goldman Sachs Funds. [1]

Meanwhile, McDonald's spent over $1B to remodel their stores [2]

[1] http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1025990/

[2] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-05...

ce4• 13 years ago

At least they got 30% (25k+) new followers.

Mithrandir• 13 years ago

The account is suspended now. Here's what it looked like:

Before: http://archive.is/Fg9Ss

After: http://archive.is/BsLQe

camfex• 13 years ago

Intermediate: http://archive.is/96qTG

madao• 13 years ago

I wish these guys would just go away, they should be using their time to change the world, not troll it. half the shit they do is completely pointless. Sure it may bring some notice to public but honestly it dies down just as fast as it gets put up.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

Bringing laughter to people is changing the world. There is no greater calling then teh lulz.

I know I got a kick out of it.

monochromatic• 13 years ago

Did Burger King do something to piss people off, or is this just random vandalism?

mhurron3• 13 years ago

Depends on how you like horses.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

Now that's funny. British?

paragonred• 13 years ago

I really dislike the use of the word "hacker" as it is used by most people. It's just semantics, but it makes me sad that when most people think hacker, they think these types of activities.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Which is why I like the work hackivist as it captures the spirit of that activity. Of course it doesn't work with criminal (hackinal?) which some people use 'cracker' (as in criminal hacker).

olefoo• 13 years ago

So the real WTF here is why Twitter doesn't support TFA, at the very least for verified accounts; and definitely for anyone spending money on promoted tweets or trends.

It's certainly something they could add for select accounts, and it's something I wish they'd add as an option for regular accounts.

Just think, a single text message and a "You are logging in from a new computer/ipaddress/application combo so please enter the code we just sent you". Would have saved considerable embarrassment all around.

habosa• 13 years ago

This is funny, but I really wish these Anonymous guys would either disappear or get 'real' jobs using their skills to build useful things. They're really hurting the image of what it means to be a programmer/tech enthusiast these days. Whenever I tell people I'm a software engineer they say "Can you hack? Hack my computer!" and I just have to shake my head.

Hackers Turn Burger King’s Tweet Stream Into A Whopper Of A Mess

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