British Army's Twitter and YouTube Accounts Compromised to Promote Crypto Scams

The British army is "investigating an apparent hack," reports Engadget, after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised Sunday: News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great . According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army's verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website....

Over on YouTube, the army's channel [had] been made to look like a page for Ark Invest...livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting "double your money" Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It's unclear who is behind the attacks.

Crypto needs all the help it can get

[quonset]

BTC can't stay above 20K and ethereum is plunging to back where it started. Need to pump things up so you can dump and make whatever money you can.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

Nah let it crash. I want $300 ETH nao

Re:

[Opportunist]

Yeah, of course crash it, but only AFTER I sell mine!

--Every BC "investor"

Re: Crypto needs all the help it can get

[hsmith]

Is it all auto buy/sell orders at this point? It seems to hover around say $20k for a week going up and down. Now itâ(TM)s hovering around $19k going up and down. Itâ(TM)s just bizarre.

Headline too Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Could have just been "British Army's Twitter and YouTube Accounts Compromised to Promote Crypto"

This is so lame.

[jddj]

Man, they could've put up the Monty Python "close order swaning about" drill, or changed it to MARY RECRUITING, or like ANYTHING more interesting than YA-cryptoscam.

Mil Twitter non-serious posture?

[LibberGeek]

I thought SOCMED was considered "important" for "national security". Was the endpoint breached? Was 2FA enabled? Was 2FA-SMS chosen over more robust methods? Inquiring minds want to know.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So confidence-inspiring

[RockDoctor]

Our beloved armed idiots make me utterly certain they are ready to fight a cyber-war. Or at least, they think they are. And who are we to differ?

Re:

[pr100]

I doubt it. Presumably the most likely thing is that someone obtained valid login credentials for the accounts.

Re:

[hoofie]

Completely un-related. The Army already has cyber war units [13 Signal Regiment] plus GCHQ which is a very dark horse indeed.

Re:

[Deal In One]

Funny thing is, I expected them to be better prepared compared to normal peacetime, considering the Ukraine Russia not a war. And UK's supply of weapons and involvment in sanctions.

And to have their public facing accounts be compromised by crypto scammers, of all people? I can probably understand if Russia compromised them.

But by scammers???

Maybe this is a distraction for something deeper going on within the MoD's networks.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Maybe this is a distraction for something deeper going on within the MoD's networks.

Have you been reading Dan Brown while eating cheese before going to sleep? Again?

Nurse! Wire brush and Dettol here, Stat!

Re:

[Rabid Elk]

What British forces? 12+ years of cuts to everything and there's nothing left, and the rest is trying to be privatised as the neoliberals in charge still insist that privately owned = more efficient and cheaper. I'm surprised that they don't just hire US mercenaries and be done with it. The only reason they don't is that the conservative politicians probably aren't on their payroll yet.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

I'm surprised that they don't just hire US mercenaries and be done with it.

Maybe the UK's politicians don't want to turn a small war into a large massacre that they'll be paying for for decades to come?

What's the bill, so far, for Iraq's non-involvement in 2001-09-11, it's absence of WMDs launchable within 45weeks (let alone 445 minutes) and having a corrupt brutal government.

If the solution is to hire American mercenaries, then the problem is to find a solution that has a hope of working at something ot