Digg Hacked

February 3rd, 2010

You’ve probably seen the tweet on twitter claiming “Digg Hacked – Screenshot coming soon” and have been furiously searching Twitter and Digg for “digg hacked” trying to find out what’s going on.

Well, you’ve been had by a new marketing campaign. Digg wasn’t hacked.

If you look at the source code of Digg, you’ll see an ASCII art that looks like the following:

This is the supposed Digg hack, but a closer inspection reveals that there’s a URL and password embedded in the bottom of the ASCII art. That URL takes you to http://www.hellisnigh.com/ – a mere ad for the upcoming Dante’s Infero movie. There’s even a password in there for you to enter on 2.09.10

It turns out Digg wasn’t hacked at all, but that didn’t matter. All it took was for somebody to say something on twitter and everybody else furiously retweeted it and bought into the “digg hack hype” I’m sure whoever started this is close to setting a new record for retweets and followers per tweet.

Kudos to whatever marketing firm came up with this idea. It’s truly original and unique – now excuse me while I run to Tweet about “Miley Cyrus sex tape found – screenshot coming soon.”

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