PM's personal Twitter account hacked, company says investigation underway

The account is linked to Modi's personal website narendramodi.in and has around 2.5 million followers since it was created in May 2011

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal account on micro-blogging website Twitter was briefly hacked on Thursday. It was confirmed by the social media giant.

The account was hacked by a group called John Wick during the wee hours of Thursday. John Wick posted tweets urging followers to make donations to ‘PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19' through cryptocurrency. 

The account is linked to Modi's personal website narendramodi.in and has around 61.8 million followers since it was created in May 2011.

"According to our investigation this was not due to a compromise of Twitter's systems or service. There is no indication or evidence of any correlation between this account compromise and the incident that took place in July," said the social media giant later in the day. In one of the now-deleted tweets, John Wick denied responsibility for the Paytm Mall ‘hack’ that took place earlier this week. US-based cyber-intelligence firm Cyble said the e-commerce arm of the unicorn suffered a data breach and hackers had gained unrestricted access to the platform's entire database. The company, however, assured that all user and company data to be completely safe and secure and termed the allegations as "absolutely false". This attack on Modi’s personal account comes weeks after the accounts of several popular personalities' personal accounts were hacked in July. The list included Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, and even Twitter's official handle. The tweets posted through these accounts offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

John Wick, a hacker group that claimed responsibility to the event, is a notorious hacking group or an actor who broke into multiple India companies, and collected ransoms from various organisations. The actor has other aliases such as “South Korea”, “HCKINDIA”. One of the tactics used by this group is “to act” as a grey-hat hacker and offer help to companies or victims to fix their bugs.