Vizag Police twitter handle hacked, cops seek more info

Visakhapatnam: Cybercriminals have thrown a challenge to the Vizag City police. Unidentified persons hacked the official Twitter account of the department on May 14, for which the police has formally lodged a complaint with the head office of Twitter in the US.

The police sought from Twitter any clues related to the hacking, like the IP address of the hacker.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Vizag Cyber Crime Station in-charge Tulasi Das said, “We are waiting for its reply. We generally receive complaints related to the hackings from the public and institutions, but this time we have faced it.”

According to IT experts, these hacks are usually caused by compromised security systems and a lack of awareness among the staff managing the IT-related tasks.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, a national level gold medallist in Cyber Security, Srihari Ruttala, who represented India in Cyber Security at World Skills-2022 in Shanghai, said the twitter handle might have been hacked by way of a social engineering attack, or a hacker might have sought to exploit the vulnerability in the twitter website to take over the account.

“In general, 98 per cent of hacks happened due to social engineering (hacking by human brains). Hackers will manipulate users to enter the passwords into a phishing page, Facebook for example. Once we enter the ID and password, the page will go to the attacker,” Srihari said.

Srihari suggested that one should never share password with anyone. “We must follow the password policy while creating any accounts, and avoid clicking third party links and entering IDs and passwords. Check twice before clicking any of the links.”

Hackers are targeting the official twitter accounts of government institutions for the past five years. Prime Minister Modi is also not exceptional as his account was hacked some time ago.

In April this year, responding to a question on the hacking of official twitter handles and email accounts, Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur revealed that a total of 631 official accounts had been hacked in the country from 2017 to 2021, and nearly 30 accounts in 2022.