Hackers May Try To Hijack Famous Indian Profiles, Here's What Maharashtra Cyber Advices You Do

Maharashtra Cyber, on Thursday, released an advisory over the recent Twitter hack that has become the biggest cyberattack to date.

(Representative Image: Getty images)

Mumbai: Twitter underwent an unprecedented and the worst-ever cyberattack on Thursday. About 365 users are reported to have transferred 1,20,000 USD (over Rs 90 lakh) to hackers in Bitcoins.  The major public figures whose accounts were compromised include US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple and Uber. Taking congnisance of the unprecedented phishing attack, Mumbai cyber has released an advisory stating its analysis of the cyber scam and the precautions that users should follow to protect themselves. "It is possible that hackers could try to gain atoms to prominent Indian twitter profiles in a similar fashion," the statement read. The agency has expressed the possibility of such a coordinated attack being organised not only for a cyber scam but can possibly be "used for malicious intents like spreading fake news and misinformation". Being vigilant about the possibility of any such incident happening in the Indian cyberspace since several Indian public personalities use twitter frequently, Maharashtra Cyber has asked Twitter to inform them of any such cybersecurity breach incident that may target Indian users and prominent Indian profiles. The nodal agency for cybercrime investigation has urged citizens to exercise following precautions while using any social media app: • Do not blindly trust content posted on social media platforms. Take your time to determine if the content posted is truthful or fake. • Do not spread or further circulate any posts that seem like fake news or rumours, or promoting hate speech and any kind of violence. • Do not fall for cryptocurrency scams that are widespread on social media. • Follow good cybersecurity practices like using strong passwords, changing passwords frequently, and using 2-factor authentication. • Citizens can also report any security problems in their social media accounts to the support center of the respective social media platform. • Report any suspicious incident to your nearest police station or on www.cybercrime.gov.in . Meanwhile, Twitter has released a thread to inform users about its investigation of the Bitcoin scam.

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also issued an apology by tweeting, "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."

Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.

We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened. ???? to our teammates working hard to make this right. — jack (@jack) July 16, 2020