The microblogging site Twitter confirmed on Thursday that a page that is linked to an account on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website was hacked. Without specifying the details of the hack, a report from the Reuters news agency said a series of tweets were published asking followers of the page to donate to a relief fund through cryptocurrencies.
To a Hindustan Times inquiry, a Twitter spokesperson in an email said: “We are aware of this activity and have taken steps to protect the compromised account. We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of any additional accounts being affected. “
The incident comes after several Twitter accounts of prominent personalities were hacked in July this year.
In July, hackers had accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hack into some of the platform’s leading voices, including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, the co-founder of Microsoft Bill. Gates, and used them to request digital currency.
The posts, which appeared on multiple accounts within minutes, promised people they had 30 minutes to send $ 1,000 worth of bitcoin and receive double in return. Some of the tweets were removed, but were republished when Twitter was quick to contain the incident.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said in a post that it was a difficult day for them. “We all feel very bad that this happened,” he tweeted. “We are diagnosing and will share as much as we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
Twitter said it was aware of “a security incident” and “was taking steps to fix it,” but did not provide further information. The hack unfolded over the course of several hours and the company disabled the ability to tweet from validated accounts – those with the official blue check mark. “You may not be able to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident,” Twitter’s support team said in a post.
Other specific accounts include those of rapper Kanye West, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, businessman Michael Bloomberg, Uber, and a number of cryptocurrency exchanges.
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