At 3:09 AM on 3rd September 2020, a series of tweets were posted from the Twitter account (@/narendranodi_in) of narendramodi.in that is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website. The tweets were removed an hour later at around 4:05 AM. The compromised account has 2.5 million followers.
In the first tweet, the hacker appealed to the followers of the Twitter account to donate generously to the PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19 and claimed that the Indian government is accepting donations via Bitcoin.
In the last tweet posted at around 3:16 AM, the hacker group ‘John Wick’ took the responsibility of hacking the account.
In a statement, Twitter has confirmed that the account was compromised and is currently ‘actively investigating’ the case.
The hacking of PM Modi’s account comes just weeks after other high profile Twitter accounts were hacked in similar fashion, requesting crypto currency. In July, several high profile twitter accounts were hacked. At that time Twitter issued a statement and said employees with high access were targeted to hack accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and several others.
On 30th August, risk intelligent platform Cyble reported that the same hacker group John Wick hacked PayTM Mall’s servers and the company suffered massive data breach. However, in current series of tweets, ‘John Wick’ has claimed they did not hack PayTM Mall.
