Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter handle @narendramodi, which is also linked to his website, was “compromised very briefly” on Sunday, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said in a post on Twitter.
“The matter was escalated to Twitter, and the account was immediately secured. In the brief period when the account was compromised, any tweets shared should be ignored,” the tweet said.
Modi has 73.4 million followers on Twitter, which makes him the 11th most followed handle on the social media platform.
The breach came to light when unidentified hackers used Modi’s Twitter handle to publish a post that falsely claimed that India had adopted bitcoin as legal tender and that the Indian government had accepted the country’s residents. Have bought 500 bitcoins to distribute between.
Some Twitter users flagged the post because the Indian government has explicitly stated that private crypto will not be accepted as legal tender in the country.
The future of crypto in India is still in limbo. This is expected to be decided in the ongoing winter session of Parliament when the government will introduce the Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021.
A Twitter spokesperson said, “We have open lines of communication 24X7 with the Prime Minister’s Office and as soon as we became aware of this activity, our teams took the necessary steps to secure the compromised account. Our investigation We have learned that there are no indications of any other affected accounts at this time.”
This is not the first time that Modi’s Twitter handle has been tampered with. In September 2020, the handle was breached by a threatening actor who used the pseudonym John Wick. Following the breach, Modi’s handle was used to urge the public to make generous donations in the form of crypto to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund to fight Covid-19.
Targeting the social media handles of high-profile individuals, including corporate and state heads, and using brief access to them for cryptocurrency has become a craze among threat actors.
In July 2020, Twitter handles of over 130 people including US President Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft founder Bill Gates were compromised.
The attackers used the compromised accounts to make false promises of doubling any bitcoin deposits made in the scam account. According to the US Department of Justice, hundreds of unsuspecting users were tricked, and deposits of more than $100,000 were made into scam accounts. However, within weeks of the incident, three people, including a juvenile, were arrested in the US on charges of identity theft and money laundering.
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