First Brands2Life, Firefly, then the Daily Mail. Today in the US – Britney and Fox News.

The last few weeks of twitter hijacking have been notable not because of their regularity but because of their hilarity.

Twitter hijackings aren’t all that new.  FaceReviews has catalogued a number of other high profile hijackings over the past year, including Disney, Nokia and Pfizer at one point. Some have been malicious. Others like ‘Janet’ who this summer masqueraded as an ExxonMobil comms employee are just plain bizarre.

However, recent hijacks in the UK PR & media space just appear to be taking the piss.

On 18 December the fake Brands2Life account went live and was swiftly taken down the following day. Ged Carroll has captured some of the posts on Flickr in case you want to relive the magic. A spoof Firefly Comms quickly shot up the next day and somehow is still going!  (Should someone tell them about Twitter?).  And yesterday – the Daily Mail UK was born. I’ve begun to screen capture the tweets post them on Flickr in the event that the Daily Mail get wise (hat tip to Ged for that idea).

So what’s funny? Well, each hijacker has managed to satirise the professions and publication in question brilliantly. The Daily Mail UK spoof verges on art.

Not funny though if you’re a valuable brand, or a person changed with safeguarding said brand’s reputation. Putting on my serious hat now, if this happens to you or one of your clients I’ve compiled some thoughts/links below about what to do and how to try and prevent it.

• Firstly, Twitter’s terms of service forbids squatting, so Twitter will act on behalf of brand-jacked companies if they are contacted. This is especially true if a clear case of Trademark Infringement is involved. Cisco and WestJet have had accounts handed over, and Twitter appeared to jump into action for Brands2Life last month.
• Take a page from the cyber squatting playbook and register multiple variations of your brand on Twitter. Including, perhaps, some malicious ones.
• Monitor your brand (or your client’s brand) on Twitter regularly, and set up automatic updates. I’ve recently updated the Measurement Camp Wiki with some additional Twitter search tools. If someone is messing about, you can be the first to know.
• Finally, social media sage Jeremiah Owyang has catalogued the entire Janet/ExxonMobil affair pretty well (as he does). His key takeaways are worth reading.  So too are his suggestions about confirming your corporate Twitter account.

The question though is whether a brand-jacker can cause real long term damage? Most people rightly suspected something wasn’t right from word go with Brands2Life and the Daily Mail on Twitter. They didn’t build credibility, so there wasn’t much to tear down. No long term damage done.

Or is there?

UPDATE: Post on the Guardian Tech Blog ‘Twitter: 33 accounts hacked, including Barack Obama’s.’ Seems like the Phishing trips over the last few days were quite ’successful’