hacked

As evidenced by the tweet at the end there, Crayola has since apologized for the off-color content. What shade of red do you think their social media team is right about now?

Wow, weak. Apparently Chipotle's official Twitter account being "hacked" on July 21st was just a publicity stunt tied into their 20th anniversary marketing campaign.

So basically, some loser in marketing making seven figures a year decided it would be a good idea to fake a felony to drum up attention to their social media presence. Chipotle representative Chris Arnold had this to say about the incident:

"Chipotle appeared to be the latest brand to have its Twitter account hacked on Sunday when its main account, @ChipotleTweets, posted a series of confusing and seemingly random tweets over the course of an hour. Now, the company has come forward and admitted that it faked having its account hacked as part of a publicity stunt tied to its 20th anniversary promotional campaign. 'We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people's attention and make them talk, and it did that.'" [via Mashable]

The fake tweets were retweeted 12,000 times, and the Twitter account ended up getting 4,000 new subscribers that day compared to their usual daily subscription rate of about 250.

I think we all know how Chipotle can atone for this, though. Cough free guacamole cough.

Over the weekend, reports emerged that the Ku Klux Klan passed out fliers and warnings indicating they would enact "lethal force" against Ferguson protesters should they display aggression in response to the grand jury hearing of the Michael Brown shooting.

Hactivist group Anonymous did not take kindly to these threats.

As of the morning November 16, the Ku Klux Klan still had control over their own tweets, as you're seeing from their official Twitter feed here (who knew that abject hate could be so tuned in to social media trends?). Just later that evening Anonymous seized the Twitter account to use to their own ends, changing its profile picture to their own iconic image and tweeting things like this:

See more funny childhood lols on Parenting FAILs!

The tweet in question (which did not feature our lovely hotdog Photoshopping skills) has since been taken down and TWC Austin has issued an apology. It's unclear if this was the result of a hacked or hijacked account, a vengeful employee, or what. Either way, TWC News Austin's 33,000 Twitter followers got an extra helping of meat this week.

The Lizard Squad group, who brought down PSN the other month and the Malaysia Airlines website just last week, are back again. This time it's Taylor Swift, the radically positive writer of pop earworms. What could her password have been? Something tells me shakeshakeshake would have been too obvious...

Update: Swift is back in control of her social media after this little snafu, claiming that any potentially compromising photos following this hack are fake (fake fake):



Meanwhile, alleged screencaps of her DMs have showed up, conversing in a totally normal way with Nick Jonas, PewDiePie and musician BØRNS. The stars, they DM pointless crap JUST LIKE US.