Twitter account of Narendra Modi's personal website hacked

One of the Twitter accounts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website was hacked on Thursday (September 3), with a series of tweets being put out asking followers to donate to the PM’s relief fund through cryptocurrency.

News agency Reuters quoted Twitter as saying that it was aware of the activity and has taken steps to secure the compromised account.

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

The tweets, which were taken down soon after, had asked the followers to donate to the PM National Relief Fund through cryptocurrency.

The message read, “I appeal to you all to donate generously to PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19, Now India begin with crypto currency, Kindly Donate eth to 0xae073DB1e5752faFF169B1ede7E8E94bF7f80Be6.”

“This account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall,” another tweet said, in what was an apparent reference to the incident where cybersecurity firm Cyble had claimed on August 30 that hacker group ‘John Wick’ had caused a “massive” data breach at Paytm Mall, the e-commerce arm of Paytm.

According to India Today, Cyble had also said the hacker group had demanded a ransom since it had attained unrestricted access to Paytm’s database.

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However, Paytm responded that it had not found any data breach during an investigation.

This development comes after several accounts of prominent personalities were hacked in July. Hackers had earlier accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s most prominent leaders including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, and entrepreneur Elon Musk, and had reportedly used them to try and obtain digital currency.

The fake tweets from these people’s accounts had offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address, according to India Today.