By
Staff Writer, CSO |
The British Army was the target of hackers over the weekend, with its Twitter and YouTube accounts becoming compromised and used to promote various NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
The organisation’s Twitter profile picture, bio and cover photo were all changed to content associated with The Possessed NFT collection, a collection of over 10,000 digital animated NFTs designed around the theme of a fictional disease outbreak. The company behind the collection has not commented on the recent hack, but a tweet from July warned its followers that a verified account had been compromised and was fraudulently promoting its NFT collection.
The hacked Twitter account also posted several retweets for various other NFT giveaways, and its pinned tweet linked users to a fake NFT minting website. An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unique digital asset that can be traded online.
On YouTube, all the British Army’s videos were deleted and replaced with a series of old livestreams featuring former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, edited to encourage viewers to buy cryptocurrencies. Additionally, its profile picture and name were changed to imitate Ark Invest, a legitimate investment firm that hosted a conference last June where the videos of Dorsey and Musk were originally recorded.
Both the accounts have since been returned to their original state, with both the British Army and Ministry of Defence (MoD) acknowledging the hack and saying that an investigation into how the incident occurred is underway.
“The Army takes information security extremely seriously and until their investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further,” the MoD said in a statement.
Charlotte Trueman is a staff writer at Computerworld. She joined IDG in 2016 after graduating with a degree in English and American Literature from the University of Kent. Trueman covers collaboration, focusing on videoconferencing, productivity software, future of work and issues around diversity and inclusion in the tech sector.
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.

source