Jeep gets hacked on Twitter
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The Jeep brand's Twitter account was hacked this afternoon and given a thorough makeover by Internet tricksters.
The account's Jeep logo was swapped with a Cadillac logo and its wallpaper was replaced with a photo of a McDonald's-themed vehicle with a man holding a Ronald McDonald doll out of the window.
Hackers tweeted for the first time at 1:32 p.m. announcing, "Welcome back Cadillac #300."
They followed with the slew of profanity-laced posts, including one that said Jeep had been sold to Cadillac.
Cadillac disavowed any connection to the hacking shortly afterward on its Twitter account.
Jeep's account is run by ad agency Ignite Social Media.
Popular account
The account has more than 106,000 followers, making it the most popular among Twitter accounts for Chrysler Group brands.
Ed Garsten, Chrysler's head of broadcast and digital media communication, said Ignite Social Media had contacted Twitter.
As of 3 p.m., the rogue tweets were deleted. The wallpaper and logo also had been restored.
But remnants of the hacking still remained as of 4 p.m. When searching for Jeep's account on the site, Cadillac's logo still appears in the mini avatar.
More hacking
The hackings of Burger King's account on Monday and now Jeep's account are bound to raise concerns about the Twitter site's security, according to Advertising Age, an affiliate of Automotive News.
Logging into Twitter is currently the same for brands with millions of followers as it is for individuals with 10 followers, meaning that a single password unlocks the account.
Twitter also doesn't have two-factor authentication enabled, as Facebook does, which allows accounts to be set up so that people accessing it from a new device are prompted to enter a password that can be texted to them to ensure that they've been authorized.
But Twitter is apparently working on such a capability.
A job posting on its site for a software engineer focused on product security gives one of the job responsibilities as designing and developing user-facing security features, "such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection."
When asked about the situation, Chrysler's Garsten put it bluntly: "Well, what can I tell you? It's the Internet."
Advertising Age and Nick Bunkley contributed to this report
You can reach Vince Bond Jr. at vbond@crain.com. -- Follow Vince on 
