The personal Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hacked, albeit just for a short period, early on Sunday. A tweet on bitcoin cryptocurrency was posted, and later quickly deleted. “India has officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender. The government has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them to all residents of the country,” the deleted tweet stated.
Immediately afterwards, the Prime Minister’s Office tweeted: “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,” PMO India said in a tweet.
In July, Twitter had apologised after the accounts of some of the most high-profile users of the platform were hjacked and used to solicit bitcoins and digital currency. The hack was reported late on Wednesday. In a sign of the magnitude of the problem, Twitter, for a short while, prevented some verified accounts from tweeting altogether. The chaos began when Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account was compromised by a hacker intent on using it to run a bitcoin scam; the scammer solicited bitcoins, posting a wallet address. Similar tweets then spread like wildfire across verified Twitter accounts. According to Twitter, some of the verified accounts which were hijacked were: US presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality television show star Kim Kardashian, former US president Barack Obama, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple, and rapper Kanye West. Reuters reported that publicly available blockchain records show that the apparent scammers have already received more than $1,00,000 worth of cryptocurrency.