India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s Twitter account was hacked for a brief period of time, his cabinet announced on Friday.
The account was later restored after the matter was taken up with the micro-blogging site, according to ANI report.
Twitter responded, and said, “We have 24X7 open lines of communication with the PM’s Office and 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.”
The PM’s office flagged the action and wrote, on Twitter, on early Friday, “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.”
According to a
screenshots taken, Modi’s personal account, with over 73 million followers, had tweeted, “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.”
Consequently, #Hacked and #NarendraModi trended on Twitter as the PM became the face of several memes online. Several users
recalled that this was not the first time that the Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s account was compromised. In September 2020, his account was
hacked by an unknown group.
In November, the Indian government proposed a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies as a method of payment in India. The legislation seeks to make those who infringe the law subject to arrest without a warrant and being held without bail, according to a
Reuters report.
Crypto-currency can be defined as the digital payment system that does not rely on banks, and borrows its name from the encryption required to make transactions.
While no official data is available, industry estimates suggest there are some 15 million to 20 million crypto investors in the country, with total crypto holdings of roughly Rs.450 billion ($6 billion).
