I&B Ministry Twitter account hacked, name changed to "Elon Musk"

The official Twitter account of the Indian Information and Broadcast Ministry was briefly 'compromised' on Wednesday after hackers took over the account and briefly changed its name to that of American electric car entrepeneur Elon Musk.

"The account @Mib_india has been restored. This is for the information of all the followers," the ministry, which has 1.4 million followers on Twitter, tweeted after the account was restored.

Screenshots of the deleted tweets, show that the Ministry handle was completely changed to imitate Elon Musk, in both display picture and username. "LOVE YOU GUYS! MY GIFT HERE!" the tweet read with a picture of Musk attached a link.

While briefly under the control of the hackers, several links pertaining to Bitcoins and cryotocurrency were shared via the official handle. Senior officials have launched an investigation into the incident. The links have all been deleted and it is suspected that they were all scam links. It is unknown how many people accessed the posted links.

The incident bears a striking similarity to the hacking incident involving Prime Minister Narendra Modi's account in early December 2021, when the PM's account also began posting suspicious links to cryptocurrency sites as well as fake announcements that the government had legalised cryptocurrency and was giving away Bitcoins.

Twitter said that all necessary steps were taken to secure the compromised handle.

The Prime Minister's Office had tweeted, "The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised...In the brief period... any tweet shared must be ignored."

The Twitter accounts of the Indian Medical Association, Indian Council of World Affairs and Mann Deshi Mahila Bank were also hacked on January 3.

In July of 2020, the accounts high-profile people and organisations such as Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian were also compromised and links supposedly pertaining to cryptocurrency were spam-posted from the accounts. Twitter took the drastic step of temporarily suspending all verified 'blue tick' accounts as it scrambled to respond to the hack.

At the time, it was speculated that a Twitter insider was behind the breach.