Daily US Times: A twitter account for the personal website of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hacked, the social media company has acknowledged.
A series of tweets were posted from the account, with over 2.5m followers, asking followers to donate cryptocurrency to a relief fund.
Twitter said it was aware of the activity and had taken steps to secure the account.
This is the latest high-profile security breach after similar attacks in July on US presidential hopeful Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
The account is the official Twitter handle for Mr Modi’s personal website, but his personal Twitter account, which has more than 61m followers, was unaffected by this incident.
A Twitter spokeswoman told the BBC in an emailed statement: “We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted.”
The tweets asked followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM National Relief Fund, but those were taken down later.
Celebrity attacks
Twitter said 130 accounts were targeted in a major cyber-attack of celebrity accounts less than two months ago. But only a “small subset” of those 130 accounts had control seized by the attacker. A number of Bitcoin-related accounts began tweeting on 15 July, what appeared to be a simple Bitcoin scam, promising to “give back” to the community by doubling any Bitcoin sent to their address.
Twitter said August last year that the company’s co-founder and chief executive had his own account on the service briefly hacked by hackers.
The security breach saw accounts including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Kanye West tweet a Bitcoin scam to millions of followers. The FBI was called in to investigate the matter.
The apparent scam spread to mainstream celebrity accounts such as reality TV star Kim Kardashian West and those of corporations Uber and Apple.
Attackers were able to bypass the accounts’ security because they had gained access to Twitter’s own internal administration tools.
“Since the attack, we’ve significantly limited access to our internal tools and systems to ensure ongoing account security while we complete our investigation,” Twitter said in a statement.
In spite of being obvious to many that it was a scam, the hackers received hundreds of transfers, worth more than $100,000 (£75,000).
Cryptocurrencies are extremely hard to trace and the account the cyber-criminals used had quickly been emptied.
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