Facebook pages for the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Miami Marlins, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, and Washington Nationals were hacked today, as someone updated the teams statuses to a variety of funny (or offensive–or both!) messages.
For the Chicago Cubs, the message was, “Fuck Bill Murray.”
The White Sox endorsed Mitt Romney over President Obama:
The Marlins announced the fan-favorite pitbull giveaway:
The Yankees posted about a Derek Jeter sex change:
The Padres post was less than welcoming to some fans:
The Giants have no love for Chick-fil-A:
And the Nationals announced they were heading back to Montreal:
The Cubs, White Sox and Padres posted similar apology messages, while the Marlins, Giants, Yankees and Nationals have just removed the hacker post.
While these posts were pretty harmless and entertaining, it isn’t good for Facebook or the teams that their accounts were hacked so easily.
Big props to Deadspin for the screenshots.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson tells me, ”Recently, several Pages made unauthorized posts as a result of actions from a single rogue administrator of these Pages. Our team responded quickly and worked with our partners to eliminate the spam caused by this attack. This was an unique, isolated incident and we are always working to improve our systems to better protect our users and their data.”
Facebook and the MLB are still investigating the posts; I’ll be updating as more information becomes available.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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