Indian PM Narendra Modi's Twitter account hacked to declare bitcoin legal tender

The incident comes at the time when the government is reportedly working on a Bill to ban 'all private cryptocurrencies' in the country with 'certain exceptions'

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter handle was briefly hacked on Sunday to share a post claiming that India had officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender.

The account, which has more than 73 million followers, has since been secured after the brief incident, the PM's office said in a tweet.

"The matter was escalated to Twitter and the account has been immediately secured," it said.

"In the brief period that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared must be ignored."

Before the PM's account was restored, the hackers posted a tweet from it, sharing a URL falsely claiming that India had officially adopted bitcoin as the legal tender.

It also stated that the country had bought 500 BTC which would be distributed to citizens.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has "24x7 open lines of communication with the PM's Office" and that its security teams took all necessary steps to secure the account as soon as the platform became aware of the activity.

Twitter's own investigation revealed "no signs of any other impacted accounts."

Sources told the Indian Express that the Indian Computer Emergency Response System (CERT-IN) will seek details from Twitter as part of its "full-scale investigation" about why Twitter's automated systems failed to flag the account for breach when someone else tried to log in.

The agency will also ask Google to provide details of the Blogspot account linked to the bitcoin tweet.

The investigation will be led by a Joint Secretary-level official, and its findings are expected to be submitted to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology soon, an IT Ministry official said.

The incident comes at the time when the Indian government is said to be working on a Bill to ban "all private cryptocurrencies" in the country with "certain exceptions".

The Bill seeks to "create a facilitative framework for the creation of the official digital currency to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India," according to the Indian Express.

Last week, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Indian Parliament that the Government was not considering any proposal to recognise cryptocurrency as legal tender.

This is the second time in about two years that hackers have compromised PM Modi's Twitter account, sharing tweets related to cryptocurrency.

In September 2020, the Twitter account linked to Modi's personal website was hacked by an unknown group, asking followers to donate cryptocurrency to the PM's Covid relief fund.

Also, last year a coordinated takeover affected multiple prominent Twitter accounts, including those of individuals like Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Elon Musk, and organisations such as Apple and Uber.

Tweets from the various accounts encouraged people to send bitcoin to a specific address, with the promise of doubling it in return.

Twitter said that the social engineering attack had compromised multiple employees.

In 2019, hackers exploited the 'tweet via SMS' feature to hijack the account of then-CEO Jack Dorsey, posting offensive messages under his username.

All the messages were posted without hackers having to log directly into Dorsey's account.