The Twitter account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s website ‘narendramodi.in’ was hacked early on Thursday morning. The US headquartered social media giant said that it was aware of this activity and had 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,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed reply.
Twitter suffered a major hack in July this year wherein some hackers were able to get access to its internal systems to take control of the accounts of major public figures and corporations, including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Apple. However, the hack of Modi’s account, as per investigations by Twitter, was not due to a compromise of its systems or service. There was no indication or evidence of any correlation between this account compromise and the incident that took place in July, it added. The Twitter account for his website has 2.5 million followers and follows 968 accounts.
In 2016 December a 22-year-old hacker cracked the Narendra Modi app. Hacker Javed Khatri had claimed that he was able to hack the app. Long since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of the nation, he has talked about Digital India. Presently, in India, internet penetration is a mere seven per cent, while those actually who own a smartphone make up roughly 41 per cent of the population. Narendra Modi has his own app which is separate from the official app which can be downloaded for iPhones, Android devices, and Windows phones. After addressing the nation on November 8, laying temporary but new banking rules till December 31 under his demonetization drive, the nation has both suffered and rejoiced.
“I am able to access private data of any user on the app. The data includes phone number, email, name, location, interests, last seen, etc. I successfully managed to extract the personal phone numbers and email ids of ministers like Smriti Irani. Not only that, but I can also make any user on the platform follow any other user on the platform. This is just the summary of this huge security loophole which I want to report. The privacy of more than seven million users is at stake if this gets ignored”, Javed told the media.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the second most-followed politician in the world with a social media audience of 110,912,648 on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, a study by online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform Company. It has been revealed by the government of India in an RTI query that Modi’s personal accounts Facebook and Twitter are handled by the PM himself. The government of India says that Modi’s personal accounts Facebook and Twitter are handled by the PM himself. As for the tweets done in foreign languages, he takes help from the translators hired by Doordarshan.
The account goes by the handle narendramodi_in and has 2.5 million followers and over 37,000 tweets since it was created in May 2011.
