In yet another instance of a Government handle being hacked, the official Twitter account of the Information & Broadcasting Ministry was temporarily hacked on Wednesday morning but the account was promptly secured within a few minutes. The hackers renamed the account after Tesla founder “Elon Musk ” and some tweets with text such as ‘HURRRRY UP!!!’, ‘GREEAT JOB!!’, SOMETHING AMAZZZING !!! and ‘GREAAT JOB!!’ were posted from this account. Moreover, a couple of tweets contained a link to a website.
“The account @Mib_india has been restored. This is for the information of all the followers,” the ministry, which has 1.4 million followers on Twitter, tweeted after the account was restored.
According to officials, “It happened for around 10-15 minutes after which the Twitter handle was resumed. There were random posts and replies tagging Elon Musk. It is too early to comment on the inquiry aspect of the matter as the plan of action is yet to be decided,” a ministry official said.
The Twitter accounts of the Indian Medical Association, Indian Council of World Affairs and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank were also hacked on January 3. In that case, too, the hackers had renamed the handle as ‘Elon Musk’. The fonts used to change the names of the profiles in today’s (January 12, 2021) incident and the January 3 incident appear to be the same. The posted content ‘AMAZZZING’ also appeared to be similar, though the links tweeted in the two cases seemed to be different.
This isn’t the first time that the official government twitter accounts have been hacked. In December, Prime Minister’s personal twitter handle @narendramodi was hacked briefly. Hackers had put out a tweet from his twitter handle on bitcoin, but the twitter account was promptly restored.
In July of 2020, twitter accounts of several celebrities were hijacked with a scam tweet encouraging followers to donate bitcoin to Covid-relief projects. Nearly 130 accounts, including that of Kim Kardashian West, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama were targeted in this attack.
