Bengaluru: BBMP chief commissioner’s Twitter account hacked

Bengaluru: On Friday, BBMP chief commissioner Gaurav Gupta’s Twitter account was hacked and tweets were posted related to bitcoins. The account was restored by 7 pm. BBMP officials confirmed this and had alerted the cybercrime to see to the issue and act against the culprits. After his account was retired, Gaurav Gupta said that he was looking forward to interacting with the citizens on the issue and spread awareness so that such mishaps do not happen again.

Gupta’s official account has 1.2 lakh followers. It is one of the most active social media forums by which citizens of Bengaluru interact on the issues of Covid and administration.

Initially, the hacker changed the account’s name from ‘Gaurav Gupta’ to ‘TSLA’. Palike officials were trying to get back the account with the help of police when its display name was changed to ‘-‘.

One of the tweets posted by hacker was, “Our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems! We want to thank our supporters and also help crypto mass adoption. 5000 BTC will be distributed among everyone who takes part in this event!! 1-Retweet 2-Joinhere: /www.TESLABIG.com.” Some comments were also posted from the same account on a tweet of Elon Musk, CEO of TESLA motors. However, they were deleted.

At least six Twitter accounts of Bengaluru traffic police stations were hacked and renamed in September 2019. In the same year in August, the state government’s e-procurement portal was hacked and over Rs 1 crore was diverted to a bank account belonging to a city-based company.