The official twitter account of Information & Broadcasting Ministry was temporarily hacked on Wednesday morning but the account was promptly secured within a few minutes. As per screenshots by some users on the microblogging site, the Ministry’s twitter handle had been renamed after Tesla founder Elon Musk and a number of spam tweets were put out by hackers.
Later, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry tweeted, “The account @Mib_India has been restored. This for the information of all the followers.”
This isn’t the first time that the official government twitter accounts have been hacked. In December, Prime Minister’s personal twitter handle @narendramodi was hacked briefly. Hackers had put out a tweet from his twitter handle on bitcoin, but the twitter account was promptly restored.
In July of 2020, twitter accounts of several celebrities were hijacked with a scam tweet encouraging followers to donate bitcoin to Covid-relief projects. Nearly 130 accounts, including that of Kim Kardashian West, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama were targeted in this attack.