A few months after the Twitter accounts of several high-profile individuals, like Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates, were hacked in a major Bitcoin scam, the social media giant has confirmed that the official Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was briefly taken over by hackers claiming to be part of the notorious ‘John Wick’ hacking cartel.
A Twitter spokesperson today confirmed the report to ET, saying: “We’re aware of this activity and have taken steps to secure the compromised account. We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted”.
The confirmation comes after hackers posted a series of tweets from the the PM’s account seemingly seeking donations to the Prime Minister’s relief fund for Covid-19 using bitcoins. Interestingly, the hackers, who claimed to be part of the John Wick syndicate, said that they did not hack Paytm Mall. “This account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall”, said one of the messages.
The post was in response to a recent report from American cyber-security firm, Cyble, which claimed that members of the John Wick hacking group had hacked Paytm Mall, gaining unrestricted access to credit card and debit card details of every user. Paytm, however, has denied any such attack, saying all its customer data is safe and secure.
Meanwhile, this is the second time in just over two weeks that hackers have been able to compromise high-profile Twitter accounts. Last time around, it was said to be an inside job, whereby the hackers used an internal administration tool to pull off the attacks. It’s not immediately clear, however, as to how PM Modi’s account was compromised.
