So if you were on Facebook this Sunday, and you’re one of the 250,000 people who ‘like’ the Upper Penisula of Michigan page, you probably noticed something out of the ordinary on your timeline.
Turns out, they got hacked. So for the last few days, the page has been unintentionally posting several links and images from a very inappropriate website.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate here. While the hack/virus is very unfortunate for the company, in my opinion, the entire thing is kinda funny. I can just imagine the shock, anger and confusion from many of the 250,000 people who unexpectedly saw these obscene “l33t”-style posts.
This isn’t the first major hack/fail on social media, and won’t be the last. Here’s my favorites in recent memory:
#5-US Airways-While it’s not confirmed whether it was the work of a hacker or a disgruntled employee, but when a customer tweeted at the airline about a flight they weren’t happy with, the reply was a very NSFW photo of a woman with a toy airplane. The air line company quickly deleted the tweet, but unfortunately not before it drew national attention. By the way, don’t google it, it is very gross. Trust me.
#4-Rick Sanchez– If you’re not familiar with Rick Sanchez, he was a TV reporter on CNN, who got fired for comments he made on the air. Before his own words got him fired, the words of a hacker that logged into his Twitter offered a possible explanation, in a hack-tweet that read “i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today”. Well, Rick isn’t going into work at CNN today, but for different reasons.
#3-Lil Wayne-Anyone who know’s Lil Wayne knows that he is a very explicit artist, definitely not the kind of music you’d play for your boss. What was funny about the hacking of his twitter in 2011 was that the series of tweets was more explicit then what you’d expect from Wayne himself. And also, almost all the tweets were insulting Lil Wayne and his associated artists, with one tweet apologizing for his rock-album “Rebirth”, and another that said ” i need new ghost writers”. Ouch!
#2-Burger Kings-In what was a very brief hack, someone signed into the official twitter account of Burger King, changing their screenname, profile picture and profile info to McDonalds. The temporarily edited bio read “BURGER KING USA official Twitter account. Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[” Your move, BK hacktivists.
#1-Sony-This hack made huge headlines in December, when Sony was hacked days before the release of The Interview, a movie portraying the assassination of the leader of North Korea. While this hack didn’t lead to funny tweets, it did lead to multiple movies, scripts and revealing emails getting leaked, such as an email that began “It’s Joel McHale. You might remember me from such canceled Sony tv shows as—Community”. Not only did this hack leak some very private emails, it also leaked the script for Mall Cop: Blart 2, which I personally hope means that the world will never have to see another Mall Cop movie again.
