On February 27, the hackers took control of Bharatiya Janata Party’s President JP Nadda’s Twitter account. They posted a tweet seeking support for Ukraine via cryptocurrency. The tweet from the hackers read, “Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoins and Ethereum.”
The tweet had a message in Hindi and addresses to Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. The tweet was posted at 9:52 AM. Within 10 minutes, another tweet was posted suggesting the account was hacked, and people should support Russia.
Soon after the second tweet, both tweets were deleted as it seems that JP Nadda’s team took back control of the account.
Government accounts were hacked previously
This is not the first time social media accounts of Indian leaders or agencies got hacked. Earlier, Sansad TV’s YouTube account was hacked on February 15. The account was temporarily terminated by YouTube and later restored.
In January this year, the Twitter account of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was hacked. The account was restored within minutes. Last year in December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account was hacked, and the hackers published a tweet alleging India officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender.
By the time this report was published, no official statement was released by JP Nadda’s office.