Prime Minister Modi’s Twitter account hacked
04 Sep 2020
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Unidentified hackers have ripped through the account linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal website, compromising the account that has about 2.5 million followers. A twitter spokesman said the account has since been restored and that it is actively investigating the hack.
The hacker sent a series of tweets from the account asking followers to donate cryptocurrency to a relief fund.
"Yes, this account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall," another message had said.
On August 30, cybersecurity firm Cyble had said hacker group 'John Wick' was behind a data breach at Paytm Mall, the e-commerce unit of Paytm.
Paytm Mall had said it had not found any security lapses after investigating claims of a possible hack and data breach.
Twitter on Thursday also said as per its investigation, the latest attack was not due to a compromise of Twitter's systems or service.
There is no indication or evidence of any correlation between this account compromise and the incident that took place in July, it said.
"We're aware of this activity and have taken steps to secure the compromised account. We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted. Advice on keeping your account secure can be found here," a Twitter spokesperson told the BBC in an emailed statement.
This is the latest high-profile Twitter security breach after similar attacks in July on US presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
The account, with more than 2.5 million followers, is the official Twitter handle for Modi's personal website.
His personal Twitter account, which was unaffected by this incident, has more than 61 million followers.
The tweets, which have now been taken down, asked followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM National Relief Fund.
Less than two months ago Twitter said 130 accounts had been targeted in a major cyber-attack of celebrity accounts. But only a "small subset" of those 130 accounts had control seized by the attacker.
