Prime Minister Narendra Modi's account on the micro-blogging website Twitter was hacked briefly. The social media giant confirmed the compromise and said "active investigation" was underway.
The hack appears to have happened during the wee hours of Thursday and the hacker group John Wick posted tweets appeared urging followers to make donations to 'PM National Relief Fund for COVID-19' through cryptocurrency.
The account is linked to Modi's personal website narendramodi.in and has around 2.5 million followers since it was created in May 2011.
"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," said Twitter India spokeswoman in response to queries.
The development comes weeks after the accounts of several popular personalities' personal accounts were hacked in July. The list included Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett and even Twitter's official handle. The fake tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
John Wick, a hacker group that claimed responsibility to the event, is a notorious hacking group or actor who broke into multiple India companies, and collected ransoms from various organisations. The actor has other aliases such as “South Korea”, “HCKINDIA”. One of the tactics used by this group is “to act” as a grey-hat hacker and offer help to companies or victims to fix their bugs.
The group also distanced itself from Paytm Mall 'hack' that surfaced early this week, in one of the tweets. US-based cyber-intelligence firm Cyble said the e-commerce arm of the unicorn suffered a data breach and hackers had gained unrestricted access to the platform's entire database. The company, however, assured that all user and company data to be completely safe and secure and termed the allegations as "absolutely false".
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