Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal website was hacked in the wee hours on Thursday.
The hackers also posted tweets from the account asking for donations to a Bitcoin wallet, stating that the same will be contributed towards “PM relief fund for Covid-19”, or the PM-CARES that Modi has floated during the pandemic.
The account in question -- @narendramodi_in. -- is linked to PM Modi’s personal website and has more than 2.5 million followers.
Twitter said it was “actively investigating” the issue, and claimed that it did not have knowledge of other similar accounts being attacked. According to a report, the perpetrator behind the breach was a hacker group named ‘John Wick’, which claimed that it did not have any particular intention apart from clearing its own name in an alleged Paytm Mall hack from earlier this week.
The last tweet from PM’s account was on August 31. The tweet has a quote of PM Modi from his monthly radio programme "Mann Ki Baat". Regular updates from the Prime Minister's speeches and other programmes are tweeted from @narendramodi_in.
The incident comes after several Twitter accounts of prominent personalities were hacked in July.
Hackers had then accessed Twitter's internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top voices, including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and used them to solicit digital currency.
