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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter Account Gets Hacked
- blooo 5y agoLooks like the hacker was like a dog chasing cars. Didn't know what to do with the account once they hacked it.
- Mistri 5y agoMaybe they invested a lot of personal money in BTC, tweeted, and hoped for a large short-term gain from the increased value of BTC?
- crossroadsguy 5y agoThen they would have just posted a credible sounding message instead of an obviously shady looking link. Saying, “My advisory team studied safest crypto currencies. We are considering making Bitcoin as official digital currency of India”, would have worked better. Or “From X:Ypm we are making Bitcoin India’s only and official currency”. Given his track record I might have beloved it. I think it was what happened - chasing dog getting the car.
- jakear 5y agoDon't expect the crypto fanatics of Twitter hacks to exercise discretion. Remember the 2020 doubling scam [1]? Hundreds of high profile accounts hijacked and the best they could do is the most ancient trick in the book. I have to wonder what the combined effect of all these scams is on the BTC price. It can't be good for public opinion for Bitcoin to be "that thing that hackers and scam artists keep promoting on twitter". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
- anshumankmr 5y agoAny idea about suspects? Most fingers will point to China or Pakistan, I personally believe the former. Also, Twitter has time and again been embarrassed at a global stage due to these hacks. When do they plan to step up their game?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoWhy do you assume it's state sponsored?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anshumankmr 5y agoAren't hacker groups notorious for being state sponsored? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_by_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_by_China Also, relations with the Chinese government have reached an extremely low point under Xi.
- yuliyp 5y agoThat's like saying criminals are notorious for being under 6' tall. There exist state-sponsored hacking groups. There also exist plenty of not-state-sponsored hacking groups too.
- anshumankmr 5y agoThat is stating the obvious. I also had clearly explained in the above comment that why I believed it was state sponsored. >Also, relations with the Chinese government have reached an extremely low point under Xi. I can't claim what I said was true about this being state sponsored. It is what is known as a gut feeling. Personally I see a counter point to my own point as I don't see any reason that in the past few months, we would have done anything to get Chinese aggression. I also am open to the idea it is some troll who wanted the money they invested in Bitcoin to get a temporary bump which would be worse for Twitter IMO if one person on their laptop can do this.
- baybal2 5y agoDid somebody pegasus his password?
- pansinghkoder 5y agoI am pretty sure it was social engineering. One can't seriously think only Modi logs into his twitter. I mean look at his instagram page; the guy is self obsessed and has team of midwits working in his IT cell.
- option_greek 5y ago> self obsessed You mean like the rest of the people on Instagram? Even if it's not Instagram, that is what most politicians do to stay in power (advertising things done by them and hiding the things detrimental to them)
- bloqs 5y agoThis feels vague and whataboutism-ish. He's known to be particularly that way inclined.
- sriram_malhar 5y agoQuite a bit more than that. He's got his photo on covid certificates, among others.
- perfectstorm 5y agoself obsession - Modi posted an obituary the other day with 4 pictures of himself attending the funeral.
- thunkshift1 5y agoCan you explain what insta and twitter is for, if not self promotion?
- abhinai 5y agoTwitter should have 2FA enabled by default. Most national governments, agencies and leaders are on twitter. Passwords are inherently insecure and things can get ugly real fast.
- TekMol 5y agoPasswords (when you use a password manager) are as secure as your computer. If your computer is compromised, you are out of luck anyhow. As the attacker then can just use your logged in browser or app to post whatever they like.
- dmurray 5y agoPasswords are at most as secure as your computer. There are many ways to compromise passwords other than achieving access to the user's computer, such as phishing and password reuse. Use of a password manager mitigate these attacks a bit, but not completely.
- supperburg 5y agoSo now instead of social engineering the government intern all they have to do is social engineer the phone company. It’s called sim swapping. 2FA is bullshit and doesn’t work in practice.
- vinay427 5y ago> 2FA is bullshit and doesn’t work in practice. You made an argument against SMS/phone-based 2FA, but didn’t address any other 2FA method such as U2F. I don’t see how your claim follows.
- supperburg 5y agoI only say 2FA because every instance of being offered the choice to use 2FA in my experience was phone based. It’s by far the most common 2FA scheme — its very widely asserted that phone based 2FA is secure and it enrages me because it really isn’t. But something like u2f as far as I can tell isn’t any better than memorizing a strong pass-phrase. It’s basically just moving the password manager to a computer that’s not connected to the internet. I guess it’s easier than memorizing.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoHow. I mean let's talk how. I know twitter has security to disable password resets. Or, like there are extra precautions for important accounts and such. Read about that. Short of someone copying the login from a browser, I don't see how this is possible. I would love to hear ideas Edit: yeah, what about 2fa ?
- littleweep 5y agoNot the first time this has happened. Why isn’t there 2FA required for sign in?
- techdragon 5y agoWhen more than one person needs access, like say a social media team, then usually the 2FA has to be piped into some mechanism for the entire team to get it otherwise things get very frustrating very fast and then it gets turned off. So it’s entirely understandable that it’s either off or not as much of a preventative as you might think.
- codetrotter 5y agoTwitter should implement a feature to allow different people to manage a shared account with a separately set up 2FA for each individual that needs access to the account. It would be entirely feasible to do so, and Twitter is a 36B USD company so they should be able to implement it.
- littleweep 5y agoThis
- jangid 5y agoLooking at the security of twitter account, it looks like an insider job at Twitter. Unimaginable without inside help.
- dannyw 5y agoBet it's log4j.
- xendo 5y agoLog4twitter
- Ansil849 5y agoA couple months ago, Twitter announced that all staff are required to use U2F for their accounts. Why not have this requirement for important accounts, as well?
- oars 5y agoIs Twitter written in Java?
- boomboomsubban 5y agoIs saying 7.3 crore rather than 73 million common Indian vocabulary? Is there an equivalent for a hundred million or ten billion?
- harpratap 5y agoArab and Kharab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
- factorialboy 5y agoYes. 'Crore' and 'Lakh' are very common in the Indian Subcontinent and parts of Middle East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
- anshumankmr 5y agoYes, lakh,crores are a common part of language. For a billion, I believe it is "arab" and for a hundred billion, it is "kharab". 1 crore = 10 million 100 crore = 1 billion = 1 arab 100 arab = 0.1 trilion == 1 kharab
- sundarurfriend 5y agoThough beyond the crore, most people wouldn't know what you were talking about.
- anshumankmr 5y agoAmbani is oftened referred to as an arabpati (a billionaire) at least in Hindi language media. Kharab is more obscure as until now I thought a kharab was one trillion.
- ghoomketu 5y agoI just wonder if the hacker tweeted "Effective immediately all 2000 rs notes are demonitized. Official announcement at 9pm." Would have crashed the whole bloody stock market.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoAnd this is what kind of indicates it was not state sponsored. Won’t be really surprised if an IT Cell team lead unwittingly handed over control of the account to an enterprising cousin for a while :D
- swarnie 5y agoI can think of a few other things which would have a bigger impact. "Suck it Pakistan, missiles launched" "Britain did nothing wrong" "After 3000 years of struggle we've finally invented the toilet"
- xony 5y agohe was hacking journalists using pegasus .. not surprised
- wtmt 5y agoI’m sure a somewhat large team manages or has access to that account, and it’s possible that one of them fell for some social engineering attack. It’s still a bit shameful that country and state representatives cannot use better security practices, including two factor authentication. BTW, the distribution of 500BTC to citizens could be a joke based on a past campaign statement by him that he would bring back all “black money” stashed abroad by Indian citizens and that would result in each Indian getting 15 Lakh rupees (1.5 million rupees) in their bank accounts. The actual wording of this promise was different, but it became a constant joke when he failed to get the claimed dirty money back. For comparison, the per capita income in India when that was announced was around 70,000 rupees.