Twitter account of I&B Ministry briefly hacked

The incident comes a month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal Twitter account was hacked. Tweets promoting cryptocurrency were shared before the account was restored.

Soon after, Indian Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-In), the national nodal agency for monitoring cyber security incidents and threats, said it will reach out to Twitter and Google as part of its “full-scale investigation” into the hacking of Modi’s Twitter account.

“We will ask Twitter and Google for their version of the incident. Cert-In is expected to submit its probe report to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology soon,” an IT Ministry official said, adding that the probe will be led by a Joint Secretary-level official. However, Twitter told The Indian Express that the account was not compromised due to the breach of the platform’s systems. His account was also hacked in September 2020.

Twitter accounts of the Indian Council of World Affairs and Indian Medical Association were briefly compromised on January 3. The hackers had changed the profile name to ‘Elon Musk’.

In July last year, the Twitter accounts of former president of the US Barack Obama, former vice-president and present president of the US Joe Biden, singer and rapper Kanye West, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Tesla chief Elon Musk sent out identical tweets, which said that if people sent bitcoins on a certain link, they would double their money.

Though these tweets were removed, some of the accounts that were compromised sent out these tweets again just hours later. Following the mass breach, Twitter said that several of its employees, who had access to internal systems, had their accounts compromised in a “coordinated social engineering attack”, which resulted in the hack.

From the homepage

Bihar SIR: Voter list shrinks by 6% after 3-month revision, about 68.5 lakh names deleted

Stalin’s caution in sparing Vijay backfires, actor issues challenge to CM: ‘Do whatever you want to do with me’

‘Had two options before me after winning elections…’: Omar says he would rather resign than get statehood with BJP as ally