(Photo: Twitter)

The official Burger King Twitter account has been hacked, and when it comes to terrible fast food, the hacker appears to have an allegiance to McDonald's.

"We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you," tweeted the account about 20 minutes ago. The Burger King avatar has been changed to the McDonald's logo.

The account appears to have been hacked by the Defonic Team Screen Name Club, a member of which was responsible for hacking Paris Hilton's Sidekick way back when. @BurgerKing has tweeted numerous references to #DTSNC since it was taken over by the hacker.

Anonymous also appears to be in on the joke. The hackers tweeted "Follow us @YourAnonNews #OpMadCow," which was retweeted by @YourAnonNews.

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303549927508832257

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303552785008435201

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303553277151281152

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303559106197876737

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303556211771576320

Update: McDonald's has denied involvement in the hack of the Burger King account:

https://twitter.com/McDonalds/status/303575465237549056

Wendy's also claims to have an alibi:

https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/303576501415186432

The @BurgerKing account has been suspended by Twitter.

Update 2:

@BurgerKing is back up and running, but it has lost all of it's followers--a real shame since the hackers helped pushed the brand over 100,000 before being shut down. The hacker's tweets are also still visible, so this was just a shitty day for Burger King's social media team all around.

(Photo: Veterinary Practice News)

A clever hacker has dispatched Japan's National Police Agency on a fruitless chase to find him after he sent emails from various computers that included bomb threats against elementary schools. According to Wired, the agency has released a bounty of 3 million Yen (about $34,000) for the capture of the anonymous hacker, who has evaded them for months by sending the threatening messages using a computer virus that allows him to control terminals remotely.

Said hacker's latest mic drop moment? Attaching a memory card to the collar of a stray cat because that's just how hard he balls.

The hacker has been sending clues and quizzes to journalists across the country, engaging them in a cat-and-mouse game (heh) to track down his whereabouts. Police obtained a set of email clues on Saturday and used them to determine the location of the felonious feline. The memory card reportedly contains special information regarding iesys.exe, the virus the hacker has used to remotely control computers and send the threats without fear of his location being uncovered.

We eagerly await the indie film that will immortalize this convergence of all things Internet--starring perennial investor Ashton Kutcher as the cat, natch.

Hackers having fun, unlike Sam Yin.

Manhattan's district attorney has slapped Gucci hacker Sam Chihlung Yin with up to six years in state prison for hacking the corporate network of Gucci American, Inc. In a press release from the office of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the D.A. noted that Mr. Yin pleaded guilty in mid-July to one felony count of computer tampering in the first degree and 10 felony counts of "criminal possession of computer related material."

Mr. Vance's announcement regarding Mr. Yin's sentence included a quote from the D.A. that could be read as a none-too-veiled warning to anyone else tempted to follow the former Gucci network engineer's example:

Today, a computer hacker is going to state prison for attacking the network of his former employer, which is one of the more than 900 fashion companies based here in New York. As we have seen in many cybercrime cases, these so-called 'insiders' at companies have the ability to harm their employers, co-workers, and the company's clients, customers, and even products. This is but one example in the fight against cybercrime and our ongoing efforts to repel attacks and protect electronic systems.

Sam Yin was apparently the worst kind of disgruntled ex-employee. After he was fired from his job at Gucci he accessed a secret account he'd created while working there and began wreaking havoc on the fashion retailer's systems, shutting off off servers and in some cases deleting data. Mr. Yin then doubled down on his shenanigans by using a fake identity to somehow socially hack his way into the network and gain near total control via knowledge of administrator passwords. Mr. Yin ultimately deleted the company's email accounts, which the D.A. stated "cost Gucci hundreds of thousands of dollars in diminished productivity, restoration and remediation measures, and other expenses."

Sam Yin turns 36 tomorrow. With any luck could be out of prison before he turns 39. We suspect he'll have a hell of a time finding a new I.T. job once he's released.

"Being an open data geek, I looked for an API. Finding none, I decided to make one." Some downloading from the USDA website, normalizing with Google Refine, uploading on CouchDB later and hello API. Now that some do-gooder has done the (not so) dirty work, where's the New York developer to find a way to make some money off this thing--or at least make it social. We're good at that part, right?

Wrong dude, FBI.

The international hacker manhunt that included on a raid on the McKibbin lofts Tuesday turned out to be an exercise in futility, at least locally. Although the FBI arrested 16 alleged hackers around the globe, the suspected Anonymous member or members they thought lived in the East Williamsburg dorms had moved out a few weeks ago. But in an interview with The Brooklyn Paper, 25-year-old Garrett Deming, one of the apartment's former residents, says the real problem was that the feds were banging down the wrong door.

Current tenants reported that the FBI was looking for the band Broken Glow, who used to live on the 5th floor. But Mr. Deming, lead singer of Broken Glow and assistant manager at Greene Grape Provisions, told the paper, "I can barely turn my computer on. Any of our computer use is for band promotion stuff.” What's more, one suspect may have been the victim, not the instigator. Brenner Eugenides, Mr. Deming's roommate, says his Gmail account has been hacked. “There was a bunch of weird Paypal stuff that came up,” he said. “Someone clearly had access to my information.”

Mr. Deming suspects that the confusion stemmed from the fact that his wireless network had not been password-protected.

“If someone cracks into that service and does something illegal or ethical, if that gets tracked, it will get tracked back to the person that owns the Internet, which is you, not them,” said Robert Diamond, a software developer and member of the Brooklyn hacker collective Alpha One Labs.

Feel free to leave your guesses as to what the Mr. Deming and his roommates named their Wifi network in the comments. We're gonna go with Broken Glocial Scene.

Turns out the Grey Lady had long term access to Fab's emails. Was it through some crack investigative reporting?

Nope, turns out an artist found his laptop in the trash and, after seeing Fab's name in the paper, started handing the correspondence over to The NYT.

This led Felix Salmon to ask the question: does this constitute hacking by The New York Times?

It's a big black eye for Goldman, which likes to be known for running a tight ship, that secure emails were streaming into a laptop left for dead in a "garbage area".

But, since all The Times did was to work off materials passed to them by a source, and since all this source did was to open up a laptop they found in the trash, the answer seems to be no.

Salmon tries to compare this to News Corps. recent hacking debacle, or to a reporter finding a key and using it to enter someone's office. But it's more like a source found an unlocked briefcase and after reading the contents, tipped a reporter.

Admittedly the whole thing has an air of misdirection that is setting the heads at Zero Hedge wild, but, but there is nothing to suggest hacking in the narrative as it stands.

Using a program called Fakelocation, Wysopal was able to spoof the Color app into believing he was in whatever city he chose. Since Color shares photos between users within close proximity, Wysopal was able to browse the photos of Color founder Bill Nyugen hanging around his California office, according to Andy Greenberg at Forbes.

The folks at Color didn't seem to mind. “It is all public, and we’ve been very clear about that from the very beginning," spokesman John Kuch told Greenberg. "Within the app, there’s already functionality to look through the entire social graph. Very few people will probably do what you’re saying, but all the pictures, all the comments, all the videos are out there for the public to see.”

The "big idea" behind Color is that people will want to interact around a photo stream defined by their location. One would think that since it claimed to use a wealth of signals to determine where a user was, it wouldn't have been fooled so easily.

The company had been considering giving users the option to peek at different locations,much as Wysopal did, but only with the permission of other users and only for a limited amount of time. And it seems likely that anyone open to the very public photo sharing inherent to color wouldn't really be that turned off by user from another area sneeking a look every once in a while.

Hmmm, what was my mother's maiden name?

The hacker group Gnosis brought down the Gawker Media empire over the weekend.

As part of their attack, they revealed sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of Gawker users.

For the security specilialists at Duo, this was a golden opportunity to practice their craft.

"As it's not very often that we get a glimpse into the human psychology of password selection, let's dig deeper into the password dump!" founder Jon Oberheide wrote on the company blog.

The result reveals a readership of nerds, idiots, lovers and philistines seriously lacking in imagination.

Here, in order, are the top 25 most common passwords on Gawker.

As part of their attack, they revealed sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of Gawker users.

For the security specilialists at Duo, this was a golden opportunity to practice their craft.

"As it's not very often that we get a glimpse into the human psychology of password selection, let's dig deeper into the password dump!" founder Jon Oberheide wrote on the company blog.

The result reveals a readership of nerds, idiots, lovers and philistines seriously lacking in imagination.

Here, in order, are the top 25 most common passwords on Gawker.