BBC Suffolk surprised its Twitter followers on Wednesday evening when a very poor taste joke about singer Rihanna and the boyfriend who assaulted her appeared on its Twitter feed:
So what went wrong? BBC Suffolk at first offered only this explanation:
Later on the BBC clarified that "something" was in fact a hack:
Update, 26.7.12: Instances of the same phrase appearing elsewhere across Twitter in recent days certainly support the suggestion this was some kind of 'spam bot'. Often such attacks begin when a user is fooled into clicking on a link they shouldn't and submitting their log-in details, effectively allowing the 'spam bot' access to their Twitter account.
Be careful out there.
It's clearly a hack. Search Twitter for the phrase - it's been tweeted by bots and hacked accounts for weeks.
Posted by: Dave | Jul 25, 2012 at 23:25
Yeah, this: http://pic.twitter.com/d1Inwepc seems to show that, for once, "hacked" doesn't translate to "I'm firing that intern".
Posted by: geeoharee | Jul 25, 2012 at 23:45