Twitter confirmed on Thursday that an account linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website and mobile app was hacked. Twitter said it has steps to secure the account and is investigating the situation.
“We are 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,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
The account is under the handle narendramodi_in. The last tweet from the account was on August 31 and has a quote of PM Modi from his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat.
In a series of tweets, the messages posted on Twitter account of PM Modi’s personal website, read: "I appeal to you all to donate generously to PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19, Now India begin with crypto currency, Kindly Donate eth to 0xae073DB1e5752faFF169B1ede7E8E94bF7f80Be6."
"This account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall," another fake tweet read.
The tweets have since been taken down.
This comes after in July, the Twitter accounts of multiple celebrities, politicians, tech leaders and major companies were hacked in an apparent Bitcoin scam.
This included bogus tweets from former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The fake tweets offered to send USD 2,000 for every USD 1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
Following the security breach, India's nationaly cyber security agency CERT-in had issued a notice to Twitter asking for full details of the incident.
The Indian government had reportedly sought information of vulnerability exploited by attackers and modus operandi of the attack and details of corrective actions taken by Twitter.