The British Army is investigating after its Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked.
See also: Django fixes SQL Injection vulnerability in new versions
On July 3, the BBC reported that the British Army's accounts were taken over and used to promote NFT and cryptocurrency projects. This included YouTube videos posted with the image of entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The British Army’s YouTube account has been renamed Ark Invest. The Twitter account has also been renamed “BAPESCAN” and has a profile picture of a cartoon monkey. The account also retweets promotions for NFT projects.
See also: Hacker claims theft of Chinese police data!
NFTs are digital assets, including image files, that can represent real-world items. Transactions are recorded on the blockchain.
A screenshot of the British Army's Twitter account shows that the page has been changed to promote NFTs.
It is unknown who is behind the invasion.
The British Army confirmed the security incident and apologized "for the temporary interruption of the feed" on Sunday evening.
“The earlier breach of the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts has been resolved and an investigation is underway,” the Defense Department said. “The Army takes information security extremely seriously and until its investigation is complete, it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
The accounts have now been restored.
In July 2020, verified Twitter accounts belonging to high-profile individuals and companies, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Apple, were taken over and used to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The security incident was quickly contained, but that didn't stop hundreds of thousands of dollars from being sent to the perpetrator's wallet, which happened very quickly.
See also: Travel company servers seized due to breach
While it is not known how the British Army hack occurred, Jake Moore, global cybersecurity consultant at ESET, said possible causes included the use of profile sharing between multiple administrators, risky outsourcing, and failure to regularly update passwords.
Information source: zdnet.com
