Bengaluru: Twitter confirmed on Thursday that an account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website was hacked after tweets called on followers to donate through cryptocurrency to the national relief fund.
The microblogging site said it was aware of the activity with the website account of PM Modi and added that it has taken steps to secure it.
“We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
In series of tweets after the takeover of the verified handle, the hacker put out messages seeking donations to the Prime Minister’s relief fund for Covid-19 using bitcoins. “This account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall,” the message said.
The account, with more than 2.5 million followers, is the official Twitter handle for Modi’s personal website and the Narendra Modi mobile application. Meanwhile, PM Modi’s personal Twitter account, which was not hit by the breach, has over 61 million followers.
In July, a hacker group had taken over the internal controls of Twitter compromising the accounts of popular verified users such as Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk and put out messages seeking donation using bitcoin.