Twitter and YouTube Accounts of British Military Hacked by threat actors

On 4^th July 2022, the Britain’s Ministry of Defense tweeted “The breach of the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts that occurred earlier today has been resolved and an investigation is underway,”

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

The compromised Twitter and YouTube accounts were used to promote non-fungible tokens (NFT) and crypto scams. According to Bitdefender a security Vendor,”The British Army’s verified Twitter account was flooded with promotions related to giveaways and competitions related to NFTs, aimed at enticing its 362,000 followers to visit a scam minting website”

The Hackers changed the profile pictures and renamed the account details to promote the NFT promotion. The followers were announced that they could win hyped-up NFT digital artworks of cartoon robots and robots in a raffle.

Similar, the YouTube channel with around 178,000 subscribers was changed as an investment management firm ARK Invest. And fake videos of Elon Musk promoting “double your money” cryptocurrency scams were published.

Investigations are still ongoing and no explanation is still given on how the breached happen. However, this is not the first time such a high profiled accounts were hijacked. Users are made aware to enable 2FA in social media accounts in their accounts which makes it difficult for attackers to gain access.

Source:

• https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/official-british-army-twitter-and-youtube-accounts-hijacked-by-nft-scammers/
• https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/04/uk-armys-twitter-and-youtube-accounts-hacked-to-promote-crypto-scams.html