American fast food giant Burger King has seen its Twitter account hacked and numerous updates posted over a one hour period. The company’s 89,000 followers may have seen some strange messages, some containing racial slurs and obscenities. The culprits also changed the account picture to a McDonald’s logo and posted: “We just got sold to McDonald’s! Look for McDonald’s in a hood near you.”
Burger King suspended their account and are investigating what might have happened. The company has also said that it will post an apology for the messages on its Facebook page.
It is not yet known who carried out the attack but there is a silver lining. Burger King’s 89,000 Twitter followers increased to 110,000 in just a day.
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DeAnn Cooks, the mother of a teenager who was the victim of cyber bullying is suing for more than $75,000 from Tulsa Public Schools, Twitter and two students and their parents. Her daughter, a basketball player at Booker T. Washington High School, was physically restrained by two fellow basketball players and photographed in her underwear. The photo was then posted on social media site Twitter.
The New York Times says that it has repeatedly come under the attack of Chinese hackers over the last four months, reports the BBC. The newspaper says that the attacks coincided with a report it ran which claimed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had amassed a multi-billion dollar fortune. Jiabao was not accused of wrongdoing but according to the BBC, China is sensitive about reports on its leaders’ wealth. 
The producer of the 1975 hit movie Monty Python is bringing a case against the stars of the film, the so-called Pythons, for a share of the royalties of the popular musical Spamalot. Spamalot, which won a Tony for best musical in 2005, has been a hit on both sides of the Atlantic and is referred to as the “musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture.”
A UK-based animation company will destroy four of its films after it was accused of misleading consumers by the way it marketed the DVDs. Brightspark Animations, a small company based in Brighton, was accused of changing the names and packaging of some of its films in a way that bore striking similarities to Disney favourites such as the Brave, the new Pixar animation featuring the voices of Billy Connolly and Kelly MacDonald.
Makers of the hit TV show Homeland have been threatened with a lawsuit for misrepresenting Beirut in a recent episode of the show. The threat came from Lebanese Tourism Minister Faddy Abboud who said that the filming “did not depict reality” and could damage Lebanese tourism. The BBC reports that Mr. Abboud plans on suing the director and producer of the show.
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Reuters has seen one of its Twitter accounts compromised just 48 hours after it discovered that Syrian cybercriminals had allegedly hacked its blogging platform. The culprits, presumably the same group in both instances, are President Bashar al-Assad loyalists and have been using Reuters’ credibility to get anti-rebel messages out. 
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