The Congress has deactivated 200 Twitter accounts of its leaders citing “suspicious activity”, a day after the official handles of the party and its Vice President Rahul Gandhi were hacked. The politicians have been asked to change their passwords, reported NDTV. The party on Thursday said that it will carry out a detailed security assessment over the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, preliminary investigation has shown that the server from where the hackers had logged in was based in Bengaluru, while the IP address was traced to either Norway or Sweden, reported The Times of India. The police told the daily that the hackers may have logged in from multiple IP addresses to make tracking difficult. They also suspect that a malware existed on the computer system from which both the accounts were accessed.
Earlier on Thursday, the Delhi Police had filed an FIR in connection with the case. On Wednesday, a series of explicit tweets were posted from the Congress vice president’s account. Most of the tweets, which were deleted soon after they went up, involved seeming declarations about the Congress leader’s sexuality, though others took potshots at the Gandhi family’s political legacy.
Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala had said, “Such lowly tactics will never drown the sane voice of reason nor deter Rahul Gandhi from raising people’s issues.” Apart from Gandhi’s official Twitter account, Surjewala told NDTV that Gandhi’s email, the party’s website, the party’s official Twitter account and the internal server were all hacked between 9.30 pm on Wednesday and 10 am on Thursday.
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