iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
In a strange turn of events on Thursday, Sept.3, it appeared that in a series of tweets from the Indian Prime Minister’s twitter account requested its followers to donate cryptocurrency to a relief fund.
This sent a frenzy wave across the country wondering why would the Prime Minister when the cryptocurrency banned in India.
Later it was known the PM Modi’s account hacked after all.
Twitter said it was aware of the activity and had taken steps to secure the compromised account.
This is the latest high-profile Twitter security breach after similar attacks in July on US presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Tesla founder Elon Musk, many more high-profile individuals.
The account, with more than 2.5m followers, is the official Twitter handle for Modi’s personal website. His personal Twitter account, which was unaffected by this incident, has more than 61m followers.
“We’re 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 in a statement.
The tweets, which have now been taken down, asked followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM National Relief Fund.
Attackers were able to bypass the accounts’ security because they had gained access to Twitter’s own internal administration tools.
Twitter said: “Since the attack, we’ve significantly limited access to our internal tools and systems to ensure ongoing account security while we complete our investigation.”
Despite it being obvious to many that it was a scam, the hackers received hundreds of transfers, worth more than $100,000.
Cryptocurrencies are extremely hard to trace and the account the cyber-criminals used had quickly been emptied.
