The hijacking of the PayPalUK Twitter feed came a day after hackers took control of a Fox News feed for more than five hours, then sent false tweets saying that US President Barack Obama had been shot dead.
In PayPal’s case, the attackers sent out messages promoting paypalsucks.com, a site devoted to what it says is “exposing the nightmare of doing business ‘the PayPal way.’“
The Tweets were removed within a few hours of the hijacking.
“Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended,” Twitter said on its page for the PayPalUK feed.
A PayPal spokesman said via e-mail that the attack on the Twitter account had not affected the company’s operations or its internal computer networks.
Officials with Twitter did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.
“PayPal UK is unaffected by this and has not been breached or affected,” the PayPal spokesman said.
PayPal is a subsidiary of Ebay Inc, the e-commerce company.
The paypalsucks.com site said it had nothing to do with the attack.
“We never condone hacking of any kind,” the site said in a statement.
