Microsoft's Twitter account hacked

Jerry Lee Lewis famously sang "there's a whole lotta shakin goin on". Lately, it feels like there is a whole lot of hacking going on. While the world is still reeling from the Target hack, it seems that Microsoft and Twitter have unwillingly joined the retailer as victims.

Today, one of Microsoft's Twitter accounts, @MSFTnews was infiltrated by The Syrian Electronic Army -- a group that claims to be supporters of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. But who is at fault, Microsoft or Twitter?

In other words, the hack could be a true compromise and breakdown of Twitter's security or, on the other hand, a Microsoft employee may have pulled a President Skroob and used a password like "12345".

The hackers incorporated humor into their devious antics, sending a tweet to a half-million Microsoft followers, claiming that the top two visited links from Internet Explorer were to download Chrome and Firefox. This was obviously meant to be a dig at both the slipping marketshare of IE and the view by some that it is inferior.

The Syrian group also warned the Twitter followers not to use Microsoft-based email services like Outlook.com or Hotmail, because "they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to governments". While this allegation has not been proven, Edward Snowden's leaked documents did implicate the company in being compliant with the NSA.

The account now seems to be back under Microsoft's control. However, screenshots of the evidence (taken by yours-truly on my Android phone) can be seen below.

Photo Credit: Memo Angeles/Shutterstock