The British Army regained control of its Twitter and YouTube accounts on Sunday after they were briefly hacked and used to post about cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. "Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed. We will conduct a full investigation and learn from this incident," a post on the @BritishArmy Twitter handle said. Earlier, the account had retweeted several posts about NFTs. The army's YouTube account, which had been renamed 'Ark Invest' and showed several videos relating to cryptocurrency, was also restored to its original state. Its Twitter feed currently has 362,000 followers, while the YouTube channel has 177,000 subscribers.
Ark Invest is the name of a global investment firm. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment submitted via email and the company's website. Hat ever black hat hackers’ motivation is, they leave a trail of computational carnage and victims in their wake. Here, we investigate the world’s most notorious hackers, who they were, what they did, and what happened to them.
Possibly the most well-known hacker of all time is Kevin Mitnick. In fact, the Department of Justice called him the "most wanted computer criminal in US history." He was also one of the FBI’s Most Wanted after hacking into 40 major corporations.
His high-profile 1995 arrest and five years in prison for various cyber crimes brought him into the mainstream just as the internet took off. In 1999, as part of a deal, he pled guilty to four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting communications.
While he did not use hacking tools, Edward Snowden used social engineering techniques and lax security policies to rifle through the National Security Agency’s (NSA) servers and 20,000 documents without leaving a trace.
Employed as a system administrator for the NSA, Snowden had access to top-secret documents, and no one was auditing systems for leaks. With the privileges of a system administrator, Snowden could look for any file he wanted, pop it onto a memory stick, and leave.
He later flew to Hong Kong to meet Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Revelations about US security started appearing in the Guardian and Washington Post in the following weeks. Employed as a system administrator for the NSA, Snowden had access to top-secret documents, and no one was auditing systems for leaks. With the privileges of a system administrator, Snowden could look for any file he wanted, pop it onto a memory stick, and leave.
He later flew to Hong Kong to meet Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Revelations about US security started appearing in the Guardian and Washington Post in the following weeks.
This teen hacker orchestrated one of the summer 2020 Twitter hacks. He and two others used social engineering and other techniques to access the social media giant’s internal systems. They proceeded to use 130 celebrities’ accounts to make more than $100,000 in a cryptocurrency scam.
Among the celebrities whose accounts were taken over were President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Floyd Mayweather, Kim Kardashian, Apple, Uber, and other companies.
As part of a plea deal, Clark will spend three years in prison and be banned from using computers without permission and supervision from law enforcement.
Also known as the “Homeless Hacker,” Lamo broke into the networks of The New York Times, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft before his 2003 arrest. He got his nickname because he hacked companies from coffee shops and libraries and lived in abandoned buildings or on friend’s couches.
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