Twitter account of Narendra Modi's personal website hacked, social media site confirms

Bengaluru: Twitter on Thursday confirmed that the Twitter account linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal website was hacked by a group that claimed to be John Wick, in the first profile takeover since the cyber breach on the micro blogging platform in July. The account has since been restored.

"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. Advice on keeping your account secure can be found," a Twitter spokesperson said on email to ET.

In series of tweets after the takeover of the verified handle, the hacker put out messages seeking donations to the Prime Minister's relief fund for Covid-19 using bitcoins. "This account is hacked by John Wick (hckindia@tutanota.com), We have not hacked Paytm Mall," the message said.


On August 30, cybersecurity firm Cyble had claimed hacker group John Wick was behind a "massive" data breach at Paytm Mall, the e-commerce arm of unicorn Paytm. Cyble had claimed the hacker group had access to the company's database, which was denied by Paytm.

In July, a hacker group had taken over the internal controls of Twitter compromising the accounts of popular verified users such as Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk and put out messages seeking donation using bitcoin.

Twitter said at this time there is no indication or evidence of any correlation between this account compromise and the incident that took place in July.