With all the information it has to offer, hopefully no one is surprise that social media has become more and more ingrained into our society. For many organizations it is the main way of getting information out. Usage on social media networks continues to rise including the fortunes of Twitter, which is second in total users only to Facebook.  Is Twitter a credible source of information, how much should corporations do on Twitter, and is it safe? Even for users, these concerns are significant, who do you trust? How do you trust? The answer is simple, Twitter does a great job verifying certain accounts and you can generally trust the most high profile accounts, but if there’s critical information to be consumed, trust but verify – and use other sources. There have been numerous public incidents where fake tweets from compromised accounts and other attacks have produced some comical results, but other times rather impactful and malicious consequences. For corporations, that social media account can be a target, and there’s a lot to consider both in value of this information outlet, and the process you use to go about it.  Let’s go through a few of the major Twitter hack incidents to shed some light on this in light of the news of Twitter’s forthcoming IPO.

Burger King’s Twitter gets Hacked
And Whopper fans cried out..Back in February 2013, many Burger King fans were shocked at the announcement that the company had been bought out by their chief competitor McDonald’s. Turned out of course it was a hoax perpetrated by the hackers on the company’s official Twitter account when they changed the page to read:

“Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped”

News of the hack hit quickly and had an interesting side effect: the company had gained more than 5,000 new followers in the first half hour after the attack.

Jeep Too!

The story put out in this one – Jeep had been sold to Cadillac which was of course not true.

“..Jeep® — Just Empty Every Pocket, Sold to Cadillac”

Who’s Hacking Who? MTV Purchased by BET – Wha?
Quick background: MTV and BET are both Viacom properties. When an announcement hit Twitter that MTV had been purchased by BET, things spread quickly. As it turns out of course, BET couldn’t buy MTV – same company, people had been duped. Why? It turns out it was a corporate publicity hoax poking fun at the Burger King incident and the incident where Jeep’s Twitter account was hacked in much the same way.  The public didn’t take to well to this stunt, it was a bit controversial, but hey we’re here talking about it, aren’t we?

Associated Press Twitter Account Hacked and Wall St Reacts
April 23, 2013 – The Associated Press Twitter account was hacked and a false story about a bombing at the White House briefly rocked Wall St. It started at 1:08 pm with the following statement:

“Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

The toll was $130 Billion dollars in value lost in the S&P 500 as investors reacted to this news rapidly. Except that perhaps it wasn’t actual investors, but a glut of automated trading systems carrying this drop. Things were salvaged quickly and rebounded when the White House and AP officially stated how this was all false. What it brought to light was how sensitive financial markets can be to events and how sensitive financial markets can be to automated computer-driven trading systems.

The Syrian Electronic Army Takes out Twitter

For a while anyway (about 90 minutes), when just last month the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) took a direct shot at Twitter itself, making it unavailable and in a degraded state of functionality for many users. This all happened through a spearphish operation that targeted Melbourne IT, an Australian domain registry.  This attack also brought down the New York Times website.

Twitter – the IPO – It’s coming and the hype will only get bigger. Corporations are using this social media venue more than ever. These types of defacements are risk issues, they can hurt brands and reputation, they can affect financials of a company and even the entire nation, and they can be just plain embarrassing. These types of issues have the potential to affect Twitter itself by undermining its reputation. Most of these hijackings are done through some type of social hacking, such as a phishing email, page phish, even a phone call may be to blame – sometimes its done by script kiddies. It is all exacerbated by the unfortunate truth that passwords are re-used and other lapses that are tied to the human element. Despite all these perils and issues, the influence of social media is undeniable and that which is found on Twitter is not going anywhere anytime soon.