The British military announced that its Twitter and YouTube accounts had been hacked on Sunday, as it launched an investigation into the incident.
“We are aware of a breach of the army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and an investigation is under way,” an army spokesperson said.
“We take information security extremely seriously and are resolving the issue. Until the investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
Its Twitter account appeared to have been hacked and had the name ‘BAPESCAN’ instead of British Army and a profile picture of what looked like a cartoon monkey in a face painting.
The account’s description had been changed from: “Follow us for news and information on deployments, training exercises, ceremonial duties & regimental events. Recruiting @armyjobs” to “#1 metavesto clan on the ETH chain with multi-billion dollar experience. Powered by @chaintchlabs”.
Even when the British Army account returned to its proper name and description, there were still retweets of posts relating to NFTs – non-fungible tokens or digital artwork – that appeared to have been made by hackers. These tweets were still on the Army Twitter at 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
A tweet later posted on the official account said: “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.”
