The Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Modi was hacked

The Twitter account of the Indian Prime Minister Modi was hacked, attackers sent a series of tweets asking followers to donate cryptocurrency to a relief fund.

The Twitter account for the personal website of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@narendramodi_in) has been hacked. The hackers have sent a series of tweets asking the followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM National Relief Fund.

“Yes this account is hacked by John Wick,” reads one tweets.

“I appeal to you all to donate generously to PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19, Now India begin with crypto currency,” states another tweet.

Twitter quickly detected malicious activity and secured the compromised account locking out the hackers, the fraudulent messages were also deleted.

A Twitter spokesman confirmed the company was “aware of this activity and have taken steps to secure the compromised account.””We are actively investigating the situation,”

Unfortunately, such kind of incident is not rare, recently several high-profile Twitter accounts have been breached by hackers, including those of Barak Obama, US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Uber, and Apple.

The official Modi’s personal website account has more than 2.5 million followers, while the personal account of the Indian Prime Minister with more than 61 million followers was not affected.

“We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted,” a Twitter spokeswoman told the BBC in an emailed statement.

The tweets, which have now been taken down, asked followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM National Relief Fund.

The apparent scam spread to mainstream celebrity accounts such as Kim Kardashian West and those of corporations Apple and Uber.

Twitter pointed out that hackers did not breached its systems, they likely targeted Modi ‘s collaborators who where managing the account and used their administrative privileges to send out the tweets.

At the time, it is still unclear who is behind the attack.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Modi)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.