Delhi Police has initiated a probe into the hacking of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account and has written to the management of the social media site seeking necessary details. A senior police official said, “We have written to Twitter to provide us log details such as the IP address of the hackers. We have started investigating the matter.” The name of the official twitter account of Rahul Gandhi was then changed to Retarded Gandhi.
On Wednesday, in the evening, Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account was hacked and abusive tweets were posted. Though the tweets were taken down later it became a twitter sensation. The spokesperson of Congress, Randeep S Surjewala tweeted that these tweets were, “unscrupulous, unethical and roguish” and blamed internet trolls for the act. Congress also blamed the ‘Fascist‘ twitter culture for the hacking of these two accounts.
Filed a complaint on behalf of @INCIndia to Delhi police. Onus on Modi Govt to ensure Digital Security and punish the guilty. pic.twitter.com/SbGHLzZqv9
— Randeep S Surjewala (@rssurjewala) December 1, 2016
Saket Modi, co-founder and CEO of Lucideus, a social security service provider, issued a statement that said, “The social media hack of both the accounts can be a result of any one of the following two possibilities: It can either be a potential backdoor(malware) being present on a computer system on which both the accounts might have been simultaneously accessed or this can be a long persistent and targeted attack – spear phishing in most cases on either the email account that was used to create the twitter handle or directly of the twitter account – on the political party. In either of the case I am certain there is more data in the hands of the hackers than just account access that might be released in due course of time.” He also said, “The only two parties responsible for the security of a social media account are the social media provider (in this case Twitter) and the owner of the account. As it’s just 2 accounts that have been compromised and misused, it is safe to assume that the exploited vulnerability was not present on the side of Twitter.”
