For nearly four hours hackers had access to several official social media accounts for the British Army, where they posted scams and crypto-phishing links.
On Sunday, the official Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of the British Army were breached by scammers who promoted rip-off collection (NFT), and cryptocurrency scams.
The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MOD), Press Office Twitter on Sunday afternoon, stated that it had become aware of the compromise of Army social media accounts and began an investigation.
Nearly four hours later at 5:45 EST, the Office updated to inform them that the account breach was resolved. The official Twitter account of the British Army also apologized for these posts and said it would investigate and “learn” from the incident.
Screenshots taken from the official Twitter account of the British Army by users show hackers promoting at most two fraudulent derivatives to The Possessed or BAPESCLAN NFT collection.
One screenshot shows hackers pining a tweet to a fake collection of The Possessed NFT. This link is likely a scam that would allow users to withdraw their funds from their crypto wallet. , one of the creators of the collection, warned that this information was false and asked his followers not to share it.
YouTube hackers rebranded their account to look like Ark Invest’s Cathie wood-founded investment company Ark Invest. They posted livestream videos of alleged interviews with Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and were being viewed by thousands.
The YouTube channel was commandeered by the thief who posted videos and provided QR codes to viewers to send cryptocurrency to. They claimed they would get double the amount back and promoted other scams via QR codes.
At this point, it’s not clear who or how the attackers did it. It is also unclear how many people fell for the scam and phishing links. The British Army has since deleted all links, tweets, and other material from account breaches.
Cointelegraph reported that as much as $1B has been stolen by crypto scammers in 2021. Nearly half of all cryptocurrency-related scams were originated from social media platforms. Even the United States Federal Trade Commission called crypto and social media a “combustible mixture for fraud.”
The Twitter account of Beeple, an NFT artist, was compromised in May and posted links to a website that earned the attacker $438,000 in cryptocurrency and other NFTs. These links appeared to be a “surprise mint” for a Beeple NFT collection.
Later in June, a similar stealth phishing link was posted to the compromised Twitter account for the Duppies NFT collection. At least one victim lost 650 Solana ( SOL), which is approximately $18,850 at that time.
