The official Twitter account of the Commissioner of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike was hacked for a few hours on June 4, Friday, and some tweets on cryptocurrency were posted. The hacker changed the official display name on the Twitter account from ‘Gaurav Gupta’ to ‘TΣSLA.’ As the account was being retrieved, the display name of the account was later changed to ‘–’. While sources confirmed the hacking to TNM, it is not known at the moment who was responsible for the same. An official statement is awaited.
It was not immediately clear whether the follower count of the BBMP Commossioner’s account or its tweet count had been affected. One of the tweets posted by the hacker read, “Our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world's hardest problems! We want to thank our supporters and also help crypto mass adoption. 5000 BTC will be distributed among everyone who takes part in this event!! 1- Retweet 2-Join here: /www.TESLABIG.com.” At the time of writing, the account was in the process of being recovered and all such tweets had been deleted.
The official account follows 65 people and has over 1.16 lakh followers. A detailed statement from the BBMP office regarding the hack is awaited.
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Last month, the website where the BBMP uploaded information about COVID-19 patients was taken down after privacy concerns. The Free Software Movement of India, a coalition of organisations working on software freedom, access and privacy, had said that the data of many COVID-19 patients, including their names, date, age, their ICMR test results, etc, were accessible to the public. The data was uploaded by a BBMP contractor Xyramsoft, and allegedly showed showed details including name, age, gender, patient ID, ICMR test ID, lab name, test result (positive/negative), sample collected and received date, sample type, hospital name if the patient was hospitalised, as well as status of symptoms. All one had to do to access this information was to add a phone number. After this, the website was taken down.