A full scale investigation will be launched after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter handle was briefly hacked on Sunday, while a tweet regarding bitcoin was posted using it.
The hacked tweet claimed that India has “officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender.”
The Prime Minister’s Office later said the account was immediately secured after the matter was escalated to Twitter.
“The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The matter was escalated to Twitter and the account has been immediately secured. In the brief period that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared must be ignored,” it said.
The tweet, after Modi’s personal handle was hacked in the small hours, also claimed that India has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them among its residents and shared a link, asking people to hurry up.
The future has come today, it said.
Indian Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-In), the national nodal agency for monitoring cyber security incidents and threats, will reach out to Twitter and Google as part of its “full-scale investigation” into the hacking.
This is not the first time that a Twitter handle associated with the prime minister has been compromised.
In September 2020, the handle of his personal website was hacked and even then tweets promoting bitcoin, seen to be linked to a scam, were posted from @narendramodi_in.
“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.
When contacted by The Indian Express earlier in the day, Twitter said: “As per our investigation to date, it appears that the account was not compromised due to any breach of Twitter’s systems.”
Many users immediately pointed out that the account seems to have been hacked. Some like Youth Congress president Srinivas B V took a jibe as he tweeted while posting the screenshot of the now-deleted tweet, “Good Morning Modi ji, Sab Changa Si?”
