Nobody is invulnerable to getting hacked when it comes to social media, even the people at the top of the chain. More than one celebrity has found that out the hard way, but few people have imagined that the list would go on to include the Prime Minister of India.
Unfortunately, that has been the case, as the personal Twitter handle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been hacked for a short period of time during the early hours of Sunday, and even shared a tweet promoting cryptocurrency.
The account has been restored, though, and the tweet has been deleted. The official handle of the Prime Minister currently has over 73 million followers.
India has been known to have a hard stance against cryptocurrency. Even as several countries have started to warm up to it (El Salvador for one), India has continued to forgo accepting it. After the Prime Minister’s account had been hacked, it posted a tweet promoting cryptocurrency and saying that the country has officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender.
“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,” read the tweet. However, the tweet was deleted later, but not before several users had already seen it.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said that the Twitter handle of the Prime Minister had been briefly compromised.
“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. So if you had got your hopes up on seeing that India has opened up to cryptocurrency, you are in for a disappointment.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) is already trying to identify the source of the hacking. Twitter also said that they had taken the necessary steps to restore the account and that there were no signs of any other impacted accounts.
“We have 24X7 open lines of communication with the PM’s Office & our teams took necessary steps to secure the compromised account as soon as we became aware of this activity. Our probe revealed that there’re no signs of any other impacted accounts at this time,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
