Hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account was hacked and restored, Twitter mentioned it had investigated the matter and that it appeared that the account “was not compromised because of any breach of Twitter’s programs”.
Responding to queries despatched by The Indian Express, a spokesperson for the corporate mentioned that Twitter had “24X7 open traces of communication with the PM’s Workplace”, and that “obligatory steps to safe the compromised account” had been taken as quickly because the platform was knowledgeable about it.
“We have now 24X7 open traces of communication with the PM’s Workplace and our groups took obligatory steps to safe the compromised account as quickly as we grew to become conscious of this exercise. Our investigation has revealed that there aren’t any indicators of some other impacted accounts right now,” a spokesperson for the corporate mentioned.
The Twitter deal with of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter and the account has been instantly secured.
Within the temporary interval that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared should be ignored.
— PMO India (@PMOIndia) December 11, 2021
Twitter, nonetheless, didn’t reply to additional queries in search of to know the time at which Modi’s account was hacked and once they had been knowledgeable about the identical, the time taken to carry down the errant tweet, or whether or not the platform employs a further degree of safety requirements for public accounts of significance, resembling these of political leaders, governments heads and others.
In the meantime, sources on the Ministry of Electronics and Data Expertise mentioned that the Indian Laptop Emergency Response System (Cert-In) would launch a “full-scale investigation headed by a senior official” and can submit its report back to the ministry quickly.
On December 12, at 2:11 am, Modi’s Twitter account put out a tweet saying India had formally adopted Bitcoin as a authorized tender, and that the federal government had purchased 500 bitcoins, which it was “distributing” to all residents of the nation. The mentioned tweet additionally had a hyperlink to a weblog, which a postscript which mentioned “The long run has come in the present day”.
Good Morning Modi ji,
Sab Changa Si?SS Credit score : @AdityaRajKaul pic.twitter.com/0YLVdzmreq
— Srinivas BV (@srinivasiyc) December 11, 2021
Almost an hour later, one other Tweet from the official deal with of the Prime Minister’s Workplace mentioned that the prime minister’s twitter deal with was “very briefly compromised” and that the matter had been raised with Twitter.
The Twitter deal with of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter and the account has been instantly secured. Within the temporary interval that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared should be ignored,” the tweet from PMO mentioned.
That is the second time in lower than two years that Modi’s account has been hacked and tweets with hyperlinks to cryptocurrency have been shared. In September 2020, the twitter account linked to the prime minister’s private web site and app had despatched out Tweets asking for donations to the Prime Minister’s Covid reduction fund by cryptocurrency.
In July final 12 months, the Twitter accounts of former president of the US Barack Obama, former vice-president and current president of the US Joe Biden, singer and rapper Kanye West, Microsoft founder Invoice Gates, and Tesla chief Elon Musk despatched out the identical tweets which mentioned that if folks despatched bitcoins on a sure hyperlink, these folks would double their cash.
Although these tweets had been eliminated, a few of the accounts that had been then compromised despatched out these tweets once more simply hours later. Twitter had, following the mass breach, mentioned that a number of of its workers who had entry to inner programs had their accounts compromised in a “coordinated social engineering assault,” which resulted within the hack.
