Both the Twitter and YouTube account of the British Army were hacked recently as part of a scheme for promoting certain collections of NFTs.
Hackers replaced all the imagery around the account, causing the Twitter link to open as a new tab. The hackers then renamed the account to ‘pssssd’ and later to ‘Bapesclan’ and began retweeting NFT-related schemes to the British Army’s 360,000 plus followers.
The hacked YouTube account was used to play a series of fake crypto videos that shows footage of Elon Musk to give a false deceitful impression that the billionaire and Tesla founder is associated with the scheme.
The hackers decided to take a more concerning turn when they dived into geopolitics and declared that the UK was at war with Pakistan.
Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed. We will conduct a full investigation and learn from this incident. Thanks for following us and normal service will now resume.
— British Army 🇬🇧 (@BritishArmy) July 3, 2022
And although the false information didn’t amount to anything, we live in an age of misinformation where it can be very easy to misuse such news, even days after the account has been reclaimed.
The British Army successfully restored the account shortly after and took down the hackers’ post of the UK being at war with Pakistan. Minutes later, the Army confirmed the hacking incident and posted the following: “Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed. We will conduct a full investigation and learn from this incident. Thanks for following us and normal service will now resume.”
The UK Ministry of Defence also took to Twitter and acknowledged the attack.
The breach of the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts that occurred earlier today has been resolved and an investigation is underway.
The Army takes information security extremely seriously and until their investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further.
— Ministry of Defence Press Office (@DefenceHQPress) July 3, 2022
This isn’t the first and most likely won’t be the last time where relatively high follower accounts are hacked for promulgating get-rich-quick crypto schemes. Some higher-profile targets include Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Kanye West amongst others.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
