A Twitter account linked to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal website and mobile app was hacked early this morning. The social media platform, while confirming it, said "it has taken steps to secure the compromised account and is "actively investigating" the situation." This incident comes on the back of several Twitter accounts of prominent personalities being hacked in July this year.
Modi’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the tweets posted on the account @narendramodi_in.
The account, with over 2.5 million followers, is the official Twitter handle for Modi’s personal website (www.narendramodi.in) and the Narendra Modi mobile application.
Modi’s personal Twitter account, @narendramodi, which was unaffected by this incident, has over 61 million followers.
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The hack
At 3:09 a.m IST today (September 3, 2020), a series of tweets were posted from the Twitter account @narendramodi_in. The tweets were removed an hour later at around 4:05 a.m.
In the first tweet, the hacker appealed to the followers of the Twitter account to donate generously to the PM National Relief Fund for Covid-19 and claimed that the Indian government is accepting donations via Bitcoin.
In the last tweet posted at around 3:16 a.m., the hacker group ‘John Wick’ took the responsibility of hacking the account.
John Wick claims to be the mastermind
Recently, Paytm Mall, the e-commerce marketplace wing of Paytm, was allegedly hacked, according to risk intelligence platform Cyble, by the same group that calls itself 'John Wick'. However, in a series of tweets, ‘John Wick’ claimed it did not hack PayTM Mall.
Hackers had in July accessed Twitter's internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top names including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk, and used them to solicit digital currency.
Twitter believes a targeted spear-phishing attack allowed hackers to gain entry to its internal systems on July 15, leading to the compromise of a number of high-profile accounts.
Who is John Wick though?
John Wick is a fictional character played by Keanu Reeves in the Hollywood movie of the same name. It follows the story of a former hitman, who returns from retirement to track down gangsters. The movie was released in 2014 and was followed by two sequels, one each in 2017 and the last one in 2019.
As the story moves forward, viewers learn more about John Wick and how he spent his early years with the Russian Mafia, the details of his nickname of Boogeyman and eventually his real name Jardani Jovonovich. We are also shown his back tattoo that reads "Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat" in Latin that translates to "Fortune Favours the Brave" which is the motto of the US Marine Corps.
https://t.co/UOdhXkLZtS pic.twitter.com/5DT1R6Yj1RJuly 23, 2020
In the past, hackers have taken up screen persona such as that of Elliot Anderson from Mr. Robot, where the character plays a hacker. However, John Wick has never come across as a cyber-security hack in any of the three movies. And it seems rather a strange irony that Keanu Reeves, who plays John Wick, celebrated his birthday yesterday (September 2).
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