Not everyone is having their way after the recent Twitter
account hacking of fast food giant, Burger King. On Monday, Burger Kings
account was clearly hacked after making a false announcement about being bought
by competitor McDonalds Corp. The profile picture and header photo were swapped
out for McDonalds branded images and more than 55 tweets and retweets were sent
out during the hour that the happy hacker had with the account. After a Twitter
representative finally responded to the message left by Burger King staff, the
account was suspended and the company later issued a statement apologizing for
the ill-humored tweets. Fox
News reported that both internal staff and their outside agency had access
to the accounts password but do not have any idea who hacked the account. McDonalds
also issued a statement confirming they had nothing to do with the hacking.
Social media, and Twitter specifically, have been dealing with cyber security
issues at an increasing rate. Twitter openly admitted that on February first of
this year, cyber
attackers may have gotten ahold of over 250,000 usernames and passwords.
While this may seem a like fairly innocent prank, brands need to be weary of
their identity through their social properties.
Companies live and breathe online. Even companies that have
brick and mortar stores and conduct the majority of their business
face-to-face, have an online presence in this day of age. Losing an identity
online is more than having personal information taken from an individual; its
any loss of control over content, properties, or information. Social media
allows businesses and consumers to create and maintain their identity online
and if login information is compromised so is their identity. Even with the
latest efforts from the federal government, cyber
security is still an issue. Twitter has considered implementing two-factor
authentication for login that would require a second form of confirmation in
addition to standard login criteria. Many two-factor authentication models send
a code to the users mobile phone to help prove their identity. While this may
help in the short term, fraud prevention models like this are flawed due to
physical theft of devices. As companies begin to take fraud prevention
more seriously, data breaches and hackings will slowly start to decrease. The
first steps to preventing fraud online is understanding the risks and having
the initiative to be one step ahead of cyber attackers.
[Contributed by EVS Marketing]
