The Nigerian Navy YouTube page has been hijacked, FIJ can confirm.
The hijack was first flagged by Jake Por, a military Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) analyst.
He accused the present leaders of the Nigerian Navy of failing to keep up with the good works of their predecessors, by stopping programmes within the armed force which kept many informed.
“Predecessors will start something good; they will come and spoil it.
The Nigerian Navy Weekly programme and the extensive documentaries have ceased,” Jake wrote on Saturday.
“In fact, the Navy’s official YouTube channel has been hijacked and is now being used to post CorelDRAW tutorials.”
A check on their page on Sunday morning shows that it stopped sharing videos related to military activities in June 2024, 11 months ago. The last military-related upload was that of the ‘World Hydrography Day‘.
Meanwhile, the page still published livestreams of military-related activities between December and February.
Since then, the Navy’s YouTube page, with a bio that reads “This is an official YouTube page for Nigerian Navy”, has been publishing tutorials for design software. The first of such content was shared in March.
The page was created on January 2, 2013. It had 7,800 subscribers and 158 published videos at press time.
These tutorials, which were all shared within the same timeframe, are classes on ‘How to Download Sapphire Plugin‘, ‘New CapCut Pro Crack‘, ‘SketchUp Crack‘, and ‘CorelDRAW Free Crack Download‘.
Most of the videos are short, lasting between 36 seconds and three minutes, but have gathered thousands of views. The most viewed video is a CapCut tutorial with 11,000 views.
FIJ also found that while this video has more than 60 comments, many of them appear to be from bots.
Bot comments on YouTube are usually generated by automated accounts, not real people. The bots are programmed to leave spam, misleading messages, or links on videos to push certain content or attract clicks.
They often flood the comment sections with repetitive or unrelated messages, making it difficult for real users to engage.
Some of the bot comments read, “Thank you so much, it worked”, “Great work here, thanks”, “Thank you so much, this helped a lot.”
Many of the accounts leaving these comments were created around the same time the tutorial videos started appearing.
FIJ found that all four tutorial videos on the channel have similar patterns, the same kind of comments and the same bot-like behaviour.
A SUSPICIOUS PLAYLIST
Another thing FIJ found suspicious on the page was a playlist that stood out from the Navy’s usual content. Instead of military-related videos, the playlist features songs from popular artists like Drake, Russ and Khalid.
Adding popular music playlists is often a tactic used by hijackers to attract more viewers or to monetise the channel in ways that have nothing to do with the Navy’s original purpose.
