British Army Twitter and YouTube hacked to push cryptocurrency schemes

The British Army’s social media accounts were hacked, and the hacker used them to send people to websites that were trying to steal their bitcoins.

On Sunday, the army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts were taken over by a hacker or hackers, whose names are still unknown. The header and profile pictures of the Twitter account were changed to look like a collection of non-transferable tokens called “The Possessed,” and the name of the account was changed to “pssssd.”

The account’s name was changed to “Bapesclan,” which is the name of another NFT collection, and the header picture was changed to a cartoon ape with clown makeup. The hacker also began to retweet tweets that advertised NFT giveaway schemes.

Bapesclan didn’t answer right away when CNBC sent him a direct message on Twitter.

The name of the U.K. military’s YouTube account was changed to “Ark Invest,” which is the name of the company run by Cathie Wood, who is a big fan of Tesla and bitcoin.

The hacker deleted all of the account’s videos and replaced them with livestreams of old videos from a discussion on bitcoin held by Ark in July 2021 and attended by Elon Musk and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Text was added to the livestreams that led people to fake cryptocurrency websites.

Since then, both accounts have been returned to the people who owned them in the first place.

“The hack of the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts that happened earlier today has been fixed, and an investigation is still going on,” the British Ministry of Defense said on Monday.

“The Army takes information security very seriously, and it wouldn’t be right to say anything else until they finish their investigation.”

“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,” added British Army.

A Twitter representative said that the British Army’s account was “hacked” and has since been closed and made safer.

The representative told CNBC via email that “the account holders have now regained access and the account is back up and running.”
When CNBC tried to talk to a YouTube representative, no one was available to talk right away.

Tobias Ellwood, a British Conservative MP who is in charge of the defense committee, said that the breach “seems serious.”

“I hope that the results of the investigation and the steps taken will be made clear.”

This isn’t the first time hackers have used popular social media accounts to spread fake cryptocurrency accounts. In 2020, hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and a lot of other people in order to steal bitcoin from their followers.