On Wednesday, the official Twitter handle of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was briefly hacked by unknown parties. The name of I&B Ministry’s Twitter account was renamed to Elon Musk. The profile picture was also changed. After changing the account’s name the hackers started tweeting “great job”.The hackers even posted some malicious links from it.
However, the ministry regained control of the account in some time and restored the profile picture. The ministry also deleted the tweets posted by the hackers. Informing about the development, the ministry tweeted that the account had been restored. “The account @Mib_india has been restored. This is for the information of all the followers,” read the tweet.
According to a report in a news portal, on January 3, the Twitter handles of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), Indian Medical Association (IMA), and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank (a microfinance bank) were also compromised. The reports claim that the hackers had renamed the said handle as ‘Elon Musk’.
Exactly a month back on December 12, 2021, the personal Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was compromised. A tweet promoting cryptocurrency was shared by the official account of the country’s leader. It created confusion among netizens, however, the handle was restored in no time. The tweet shared by the hackers read, “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.” After the restoration of PM’s handle, a tweet was shared that read, “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”.
