UK Army restores its Twitter & YouTube handles after hackers retweet posts on crypto, NFT

The UK Army on Monday successfully restored its Twitter and YouTube accounts after they were briefly hacked. The British military informed that they have "resolved the issue" after confirming that the social media handles were under security "breach" on Sunday.  An investigation has been launched into the "serious threat" posed to military intelligence social media sites amid the ongoing war in eastern Europe.

"Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed. We will conduct a full investigation and learn from this incident," British Defence Ministry wrote on its Twitter handle.

After the brief cyber attack, the UK military's Twitter account was renamed 'BAPESCAN' with the profile picture changed to a pink hoodie-donned cartoon-figured monkey wearing black ribbed goggles. The description too was changed to "#1 metavesto clan on the ETH chain with multi-billion dollar experience. Powered by @chaintchlabs. (sic)"

There were recurrent posts and retweets about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency. In one instance a video posted on British Army's YouTube channel used snips of tech giant Elon Musk. The YouTube channel was renamed  'Ark Invest', which is a global investment firm.

UK Army restores its social media accounts

A British Army spokesperson, as quoted by the BBC, informed that the social media handles returned to normal functioning following the brief digital ambush. “We are aware of a breach of the army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and an investigation is underway. We take information security extremely seriously and are resolving the issue. Until the investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further," the spokesperson said. He added, "We have now resolved the issues an investigation is ongoing." The British intelligence department is currently working to identify the hackers behind the security breach.

UK Army faces flak for failing to take precautions

UK's Conservative Party MP Tobias Ellwood slammed British Army for risking to take adequate measures to prevent security breaches of its social media amid serious threats of Russian cyber attacks. Ellwood, who is the chair of the Commons defence select committee said that the security infringement "looked serious," BBC reported. He hoped that the result of the investigation and actions taken to ascertain the source of the unprecedented hacking "will be shared appropriately."

The British army recruitment admissions were also temporarily suspended after intelligence officials became aware of the overhaul. "Following the compromise of a small section of recruit data, the army's online recruitment services were temporarily suspended pending an investigation," the spokesperson added. The cryptocurrency tweets and retweets were up on Twitter until 8:30 pm (local time), they have been removed now.

(Image: @BritishArmy/Unsplash/Representative)