India Prime Minister’s Twitter Compromised: Hacker Posts a Bitcoin Scam

The Prime Minister of India – Narendra Mori – had his official Twitter account. While under the control of the perpetrator, the account published a tweet of a BTC giveaway scam.

• Narendra Modi is the acting Prime Minister of India, and he got re-elected back in 2019 for another term.
• His Twitter account has over 73.4 million followers, and, unfortunately, it got compromised earlier today.
• This was confirmed by the Office of the Prime Minister of India in a separate tweet, which said:

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.

• The attacker/s didn’t waste any time and quickly tried to take full advantage of the situation. The weapon of choice was a well-known phishing attack through a giveaway scam.
• The malicious tweet said that “India has officially adopted Bitcoin as legal tender” and that the “government has officially bought 500 BC and is distributing them to all residents of the country.”
• This was also followed by a link which most likely was a phishing website.

Source: Twitter

• Even if the information were serious, which it wasn’t, this would mean that each out of the 1.4 billion people in India would have received 0.000000035 BTC, currently worth around $0.0017 or INR 0.13.
• This isn’t the first time when the Twitter account of a prominent figure was compromised. Back in 2020, accounts of people such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and so forth, all had their handles hacked.

Featured image courtesy of Livemint