It has to hurt when your chief competitor tweets, "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking."

The LulzSec pranskster hacktivists are claiming credit for Monday's hacking of the official Burger King account, which entailed subbing in McDonalds' golden arches and changing the name of @BurgerKing to McDonalds at a little after noon ET on Monday. BK confirmed to the Associated Press that it asked Twitter to take its @burgerking account offline while it repaired the damage.

Update: @BurgerKing went back online around 10pm EST Monday night, leaving a few of of the hackers' retweets intact:

Other fake BK tweets during the hack included, “We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you," and the background picture changed to McDonald's new Fish McBites menu item. And subsequent tweets used the hashtag #OpMadCow and, "if I catch you at a wendys, we're fightin!"Continue reading...

Pfizer was compelled to take down its Facebook page after being hacked July 19th by U.K. hackers, The Script Kiddies, who claimed responsibility for the social misdeed on Twitter. The group's grievance, apparently, is that (in their words) the pharma giant is “A Corrupt Corporate American Company guilty of cutting corners and killing people.” Such are the charming times we live in.

A screenshot of the hacked posts shows the Pfizer logo smeared in red (above) and information about Pfizer's $2.3 billion settlement of a U.S. investigation of its drug-marketing practices in 2009. 

Hackers have been targeting government agencies and major corporations in the past several months — if you haven't read about Operation Shady RAT, Vanity Fair has a good backgrounder — so the fear is this attack is just the tip of the online iceberg for Big Pharma, an industry that was already tiptoeing (read: reticent) to embrace social media.Continue reading...