On 3 September, Twitter acknowledged the news on Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi’s Twitter account hack. The cybercriminals sent a series of hoax tweets from the account requesting followers to contribute cryptocurrencies to Narendra’s relief fund. The Twitter account has been active since 2011, and has over 2.5 million followers. All funds go to helping people affected by natural disasters; the donations are usually in fiat currencies.
Upon discovering the attack, twitter took necessary measures to secure the compromised account. According to a Twitter spokesman, the site is actively investigating the situation. Furthermore, they mentioned that they were unaware of other accounts affected that way. However, the site pulled down all tweets from the Twitter account hack, restoring Narenda’s website.
‘John Wick’ Group Responsible
A group of hackers naming themselves after the famous protagonist of the movie series John Wick took responsibility. They represented two addresses for BTC and ETH for users to send their donations. Nonetheless, Blockchain.com confirmed that users did not transfer any funds to both addresses.
Additionally, a Twitter source provided a thread of several tweets of the group discrediting all accusations concerning an earlier attack on Paytm Mall. The hack on the e-commerce marketplace was on 30 August by cyberattackers claiming to be representatives of ‘John Wick’. Despite this, Paytm Mall denied the claims on the same matter declaring that users’ data was secure.
Incident Comes After Most Massive Twitter Account Hack
On 15th July 2020, there was an attack on Twitter’s internal system, and some twitter accounts belonging to top profiles got hacked. Hackers sent tweets through the compromised accounts containing the same message. The attackers asked followers to contribute cryptos, and in exchange of a double value of the coins they sent.
These tweets contained a valid Bitcoin address where tricked people sent their cryptocurrencies. One platform by the name Blockchain.com, the hackers’ account received 12.86 BTC. That amount received through Blockchain.com is equivalent to $ 118 482.65.
Some of the attack’s twitter accounts included Tesla’s founder Elon Musk, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates, Barrack Obama, and Jeff Bezos. The breach affected Uber ride-sharing services and Apple software and hardware giant. There is also a long list of other twitter accounts belonging to major figures that got hacked, including CZ, the CEO of Binance.
Twitter confirmed the major hack through its technical support @Twitter Support. Twitter also promised to take the necessary steps to fix that breach.
After the cyber-attack, Twitter focused on restoring access for all account owners, investigating that security incident, and cooperating with the law about the situation. Twitter also rolled out on training against social engineering tactics, and it also began to build trust with the Twitter users.