Twitter account of I&B Ministry hacked, restored after few minutes

The Twitter account of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was briefly compromised on January 12, 2022. The hackers changed the name of the account as Elon Musk and started tweeting ‘great job’ and even posted some malicious links from it. However, the ministry later regained control of the profile and deleted the tweets posted by the hackers. The incident comes a month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal Twitter handle was briefly hacked on December 1, 2021. Tweets promoting cryptocurrency were shared before the account was restored. Soon after, Indian Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-in), the national nodal agency for monitoring cyber security incidents and threats, said it will reach out to Twitter and Google as part of its “fullscale investigation” into the hacking of Modi’s Twitter account. On January 3, the Twitter accounts of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), Indian Medical Association (IMA) and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank (a microfinance bank) were hacked. In that case, too, the hackers had renamed the handle as ‘Elon Musk’.