The personal Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hacked with a message saying that India has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and will distribute it to all citizens.
The tweet was quickly removed and Modi’s office said the account was hacked for a very short period.
This is the second time that Modi’s Twitter account has been hacked.
The Indian Prime Minister uses Twitter a lot and is followed by more than 61 million followers.
The text of the deleted tweet indicates that the Indian government has officially purchased 500 bitcoins and is “distributing them to all residents of the country.”
Last year, Modi’s official account was hacked and a tweet was sent urging people to donate to a fake coronavirus relief fund.
Twitter said at the time that it was aware of the activity and took steps to protect the hacked account.
“We are seriously investigating the incident. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts affected by the attack,” a Twitter spokeswoman told the BBC in an email statement.
Modi has two Twitter accounts, a personal one (with more than 61 million followers) and her own official as Prime Minister of India (with more than Four. Five million followers).
The latest hack comes as India prepares to crack down on popular cryptocurrency trading, enacting a new law that will likely go through Parliament this month.
Last month, Modi said that cryptocurrencies could “corrupt our youth.”
Notably, this security breach is the most recent account by a high-ranking official and famous person since the accounts of US presidential candidate Joe Biden and Tesla founder Elon Musk were subjected to similar attacks in July. 2020.
And Twitter had said in the middle of last year that 130 accounts were the target of a major cyberattack against celebrity accounts. But only a “small subset” of those 130 accounts could be controlled by hackers.
That security breach saw accounts including those of former US President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates exploiting the Twitter scam using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for millions of followers. Twitter has called in the FBI to investigate the attack.
The attackers were able to bypass the security of the accounts because they gained access to Twitter’s internal administration tools.
“Since the attack, we have significantly restricted access to our internal tools and systems to ensure continued account security while we complete our investigations,” Twitter said.
Although it was clear to many that it was a scam, the hackers received hundreds of transfers worth more than $ 100,000.
It is very difficult to trace the stolen or transferred cryptocurrency after quickly emptying the account used by cyber criminals.
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