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Reuters
The hacked tweets have since been taken down
Twitter has confirmed that an account linked to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hacked.
A series of tweets were sent from the account asking followers to donate to a relief fund through cryptocurrency.
The platform said it was aware of the activity and has taken steps to secure the compromised account.
It’s the latest high-profile security breach following similar attacks in July on US presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
“We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted,” a Twitter spokeswoman told the BBC.
The account hacked is the official handle of Mr Modi’s personal website and the Narendra Modi app.
The tweets, which have now been taken down, asked followers to donate to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund through cryptocurrency.
Twitter has confirmed that the personal website account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hacked.
A series of tweets were sent from the account asking followers to donate to a relief fund through cryptocurrency.
The messaging platform said it was aware of the activity and has taken steps to secure the compromised account.
This is the latest high-profile security breach following similar attacks in July on US presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
The account, with over 2.5m followers, is the official Twitter handle for Mr Modi’s personal website.
His personal Twitter account, which was unaffected by this incident, has more than 61m followers.
“We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted,” a Twitter spokeswoman told Reuters in an emailed statement.
The tweets, which have now been taken down, asked followers to donate to the PM National Relief Fund through cryptocurrency.
Celebrity attacks
Less than two months ago Twitter said 130 accounts were targeted in a major cyber-attack of celebrity accounts. But only a “small subset” of those 130 accounts had control seized by the attacker.
The security breach saw accounts including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates tweet a Bitcoin scam to millions of followers. The FBI was called in to investigate.
The apparent scam spread to mainstream celebrity accounts such as Kim Kardashian West and those of corporations Apple and Uber.
Attackers were able to bypass account security because they had somehow gained access to Twitter’s own internal administration tools.
Twitter said “Since the attack, we’ve significantly limited access to our internal tools and systems to ensure ongoing account security while we complete our investigation.”
Despite the fact that the scam was obvious to some, the attackers received hundreds of transfers, worth more than $100,000 (£80,000).
Crypto-currencies are extremely hard to trace and the account the cyber-criminals used had quickly been emptied.
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