Burger King has apologized for today's hacking of its Twitter account in which someone changed the feed to look like that of McDonald's, adding that it does not have confirmation of who was behind the hack.
"We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics," Burger King said in a statement to the Tribune this afternoon. The company worked with Twitter administrators to suspend the account after the bogus tweets were discovered, the statement said.
The hackers substituted the McDonald's logo in place of the familiar one for Burger King and sent tweets promoting the music of controversial Chicago rapper Chief Keef, some vulgar tweets and other tweets making outrageous claims about Burger King employees and practices.
Around 11 a.m. today came the first apparently fake tweet on the @BurgerKing feed, announcing, "We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you."
The account sent more than a dozen tweets over the next hour, including a link to a video by Chief Keef.
"We caught one of our employees in the bathroom doing this ?" read one of the tweets, accompanied with a photo of someone injecting himself with a syringe.
By 12:15 p.m., the account had been suspended. The account was still inactive at 3:15 p.m.
"We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings," Burger King's statement said.
But not before jokes about the hack were racing across Twitter.
"Somebody needs to tell Burgerking that 'whopper123' isn't a secure password," Twitter user @flibblesan cracked.
McDonald's took to Twitter to assure its fast-food competitor that it was not behind the hack. "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts," McDonald's said via the actual @McDonald's account. "Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking."
The McDonald's image used on the hacked @BurgerKing account was the same picture of the new Fish McBites used on the @McDonalds account.
Twitter acknowledged earlier this month that some 250,000 user passwords had been compromised, though it was not clear today if the one belonging to @BurgerKing was among them.
rmanker@tribune.com
Twitter: @RobManker
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