On Sunday, hackers took control of the British Army’s official social media accounts, using them to promote fraudulent NFT collections and crypto scams for more than four hours.
Crypto scams and hacks have affected billions of individuals worldwide over the past several years, becoming increasingly commonplace everyday occurrences.
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Previously, the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, President Joe Biden, and many other high-profile individuals have been hacked. Additionally, there have been several examples when these types of accounts have been utilized in cryptocurrency scams.
According to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) records of scams, there were over 7,000 victims of crypto scams in the United States who collectively lost close to $80 million from October 2020 to the next year till March.
British Army’s Twitter and YouTube Accounts Used For Crypto Scam
The Hacker (whose identity is still unknown) hacked the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts. PSSSSD was used as the Twitter account’s new name, and “The PossessedNFT” was highlighted in the account’s profile images. Meanwhile, the name of another NFT was also utilized by the Hacker. He subsequently changed the account name from PSSSSD to “Bapesclan.”
The U.K. Ministry of Defence Press Office announced through Twitter that an inquiry had been started after learning that the Army’s social media accounts had been hacked.
Users were also alerted about a “new verified SCAM account” by The Possessed’s official Twitter account:
Posse, there is a new verified SCAM account. Please report and go careful.
The Possessed is an animated NFTs collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The co-creators of PSSSSD Labs, artist Joe and developer Tom builds, carried out the experiments that transformed the test subjects into possessed NFTs.
Well, the scammers posted several links to NFT giveaways on Army’s Twitter account. But after almost 4 hours, all such tweets have since been removed, and the account has been recovered.
On the other hand, hackers renamed the YouTube account for the U.K. military to “Ark Invest” (Owned by Tesla and Cathie Wood). In addition, they live-streamed old videos of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk talking about Bitcoin in interviews.
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Both accounts were recovered safely, and an apology was also made on the official British Army Twitter account:
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.
Ministry of Defence Press Office tweeted on July 3rd:
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.
Featured image from Flickr, and chart from Tradingview.com