Modi's Twitter A/C Hacked With Bitcoin Post, ‘Pomptly Secured'

No Breach Of Our Systems: Twitter; Govt Orders Probe

- Pankaj Doval

New Delhi: PM Modi’s personal Twitter account was hacked for a brief period during the early hours of Sunday, prompting the Centre’s cyber security wing CERT-In to order a high-level inquiry into the incident that follows a similar breach in September last year where an account linked to the PM’s personal website was compromised.

The latest incident saw the hackers put out a tweet from the PM’s Twitter handle—it has more than 73.4 million followers—claiming that India has “officially adopted Bitcoin as legal tender”. Sharing a link and asking people to“hurry up”, the tweet added, “The government has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them to all residents of the country”.

The Centre promptly alerted Twitter and asked users to ignore the tweet. “The account was immediately secured.” the PMO tweeted. Twitter said according to its internal investigations, “it appears the account wasn’t compromised due to any breach of our systems”.

PM’s account ‘secured’ in brief period, probe launched

The first official info about the breach was sent out through the PM’s official Twitter account (@PMOIndia) at 03:18 am: “The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter... In the brief period that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared must be ignored”. As chatter around the breach spread, the matter started trending on Twitter with the hashtags such as #hacked.