On the intervening night of December 11 and December 12, the hackers got hold of the Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a brief period. A tweet promoting cryptocurrency was shared during that period. The account was swiftly restored, and the tweet was deleted.
Content of the tweet posted from PM’s account
Before the access to the PM’s account was restored, a tweet was shared with a URL from the account that read, “India has officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender. The government has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them to all residents of the country.” OpIndia has masked the URL mentioned in the tweet.
According to sources, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) is on the job and is trying to identify the source of the hacking incident. Latest technology is being used for the same.
Informing about the incident, Prime Minister’s Office said in a tweet, “The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter, and the account has been immediately secured. In the brief period that the account was compromised, any tweet shared must be ignored.”
PM Modi’s personal account was compromised last year
In September 2020, the Twitter account of Prime Minister Modi that was linked to his personal website was hacked. A series of tweets promoting cryptocurrency was published during the brief period. The hacker had appealed to the public to donate generously to the PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19 and claimed that the Indian government is accepting donations via ETH. In a statement, Twitter had confirmed that the account was compromised and is currently ‘actively investigating’ the case.
Multiple high profile accounts were compromised in July 2020
Prior to that, several high profile accounts were hacked on Twitter, including those of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and several others. On August 30, risk intelligent platform Cyble reported that the same hacker group John Wick hacked PayTM Mall’s servers, and the company suffered a massive data breach. However, in the current series of tweets, ‘John Wick’ has claimed they did not hack PayTM Mall.
In a statement, Twitter claimed that it was a coordinated social engineering attack by people who managed to gain access to employees who had access to internal systems and tools. Social engineering is manipulating individuals using deceptive means into divulging confidential or personal information which may be used for fraudulent purposes.
