Ford Social Account Briefly Compromised

For a hot minute today, anyone looking at the Twitter (X) account belonging to the Ford Motor Company will have found some unexpected messages.

The account now seems back to normal, with the most recent post dated a couple of hours ago simply bragging about the sales dominance of its F-Series pickup trucks. However, screenshots live forever and our intrepid Managing Editor snagged one showing the account randomly shouting about Israel and Palestine.

Stunts like these, in which bad actors worm their way into a corporate social media presence and make posts decidedly not approved by those in the corner office, have been happening pretty much since Al Gore invented the internet. Some are more destructive than others, while some – like today’s incident – are dealt with relatively swiftly whilst giving admins a headache.

Hacks in the car industry aren’t restricted to social media, of course. Alert readers will recall the CDK disaster earlier this year which brought some 15,000 dealers in the United States and Canada to a state of near paralyzation. The company’s dealer management software was breached by hackers twice in rapid succession, a major problem since its programs are in each corner of many dealerships: finance, sales, parts, service – all the big stuff.

This prompted many to revert to pen-and-paper during the outage, which lasted nearly a month in some instances. The problem only went away after CDK allegedly paid a ransom of about 380 Bitcoin to the hackers, a sum valued at roughly $25 million six months ago but worth something north of $350 million today.