Monday it was Burger King and Tuesday it was Jeep that suffered an unsolicited Twitter makeover, courtesy of savvy hackers.
The attacks were similar. In both cases unidentified intruders adorned their target's Twitter page with a competitor's branding. A McDonald's logo popped up on Burger King's page, which proclaimed that the company "just got sold ... because the whopper flopped," while a message on Jeep's Twitter banner said "sold to Cadillac."
Once in the driver's seat, hackers tweeted out a string of obscenity-laden messages, some bashing the brand and praising its competitors, before the pages were finally restored. Jeep's breach was repaired in under an hour, but that was enough time for the page's hijackers to tweet out more than a dozen messages. Burger King's hackers were able to pump out 53 messages before the false page was shut down.
Both companies apologized for the incidents and said they worked with Twitter security administrators to fix the problem, but so far the social media giant has not provided insight into the twin attacks. The company told NBC News Tuesday that it does not comment on individual accounts.
But the social media giant did post a security message on its blog Tuesday evening acknowledging that "over the past couple of days, there's been a fair amount of conversation about account security on Twitter." The post went on to recommend a few best practices, including using a strong password, being wary of suspicious links and keeping computers up to date with anti-virus software.
Meanwhile, MTV and BET, apparently making light of what could be a serious threat to high-profile corporations, changed their profiles Tuesday afternoon to give the appearance that they too had been hacked.
For about an hour the two companies, both owned by Viacom, swapped Twitter logos and sent out suspicious tweets before ending the ruse. We totally Catfish-ed you guys. Thanks for playing!" MTV tweeted, referring to the practice of assuming false online identities.
Kurt Patat, a vice president at MTV Networks told the Huffington Post that it was "all in the spirit of good fun."