On the intervening night of December 11 and December 12, the hackers got hold of the Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a brief period. A tweet promoting cryptocurrency was shared during that period. The account was swiftly restored, and the tweet was deleted.
Before the access to the PM’s account was restored, a tweet was shared with a URL from the account that read, “India has officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender. The government has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them to all residents of the country.”
According to sources, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) is on the job and is trying to identify the source of the hacking incident. Latest technology is being used for the same.
Informing about the incident, Prime Minister’s Office said in a tweet, “The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter, and the account has been immediately secured. In the brief period that the account was compromised, any tweet shared must be ignored.”