Thursday, February 21, 2013

Jeep joins Burger King in Twitter hack club

Just a day after Burger King's Twitter account was hacked and renamed McDonalds, Jeep is suffering the same fate ? but the takeover hoax isn't credited to the fast food empire this time. Jeep's hacked account says it's been bought by Cadillac, of all things.

The account was briefly rebadged, so to speak, to feature a brand new Cadillac ATS, and tweets are pouring out praising Cadillac in the same coarse and thuggish vernacular seen on Burger King's account. The Jeep account also called out several users of Twitter as "da bad guys," one of which tweeted that it was the user @GUHTI_, or ITHUG, who had actually perpetrated the hack.

The Detroit Bureau pointed out that, ironically, @Jeep had only a few minutes earlier tweeted about online security, specifically in response to the Burger King hack.

That two high-profile accounts could be hacked in such quick succession suggests that the hackers have some kind of reliable exploit they're using. Twitter did not respond to questions along this line, saying " We don?t comment on individual accounts." Jeep did tell NBC News that "We're aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible." The @Jeep Twitter page has since reverted back to its pre-hacked appearance.

The nature of the hack is unknown as yet ? it could be a serious security hole on Twitter's end, or the hacker could have compromised a computer with access to the Jeep account. Cadillac denied any involvement, much as McDonalds did yesterday.

Jeep's hacked account ceased tweeting after just 10 minutes and 13 tweets ? a much-improved response time over yesterday's hack, which lasted for over and hour, over the course of which the hacker tweeted 53 times (and garnered 73,421 retweets). But chances are this particular hacker's reign of terror isn't over yet.

Update: Shortly after this post went live, MTV's Twitter account also appeared to have been taken over, this time being rebranded as BET. As it turned out, this was a publicity stunt to promote both networks, which are owned by Viacom. The account of a PR representative warned of the hack ahead of time on Twitter and then both MTV and BET copped to the scheme after the "hack" had lasted a few minutes.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/jeep-joins-burger-king-twitter-hack-club-1C8415557

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