NEW DELHI: Twitter on Tuesday temporarily shut down the accounts of veteran actor Anupam Kher, RSS leader and BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, economist Kaushik Basu and senior Indian journalist and Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta after they were allegedly hacked by pro-Pakistani Turkish cyber army Ayyildiz Tim.
The 62-year-old veteran actor confirmed the news as he said, “My twitter account has been hacked. Just got few calls from friends in India about it. I am in LA and it is 1am. Got a DM yesterday from Swapan Das Gupta’s account about a link. A first from him. So opened it. Have spoken to twitter already.”
The hackers uploaded an image of the ‘Turkish cyber army’ flag along with a caption. The blue tick (indicating a verified account) had disappeared from Kher's Twitter account before the social networking giant temporarily suspended it.
Kher's account handle was changed from @anupampkher to @anupampkhertc and his tweets bore unusual messages. The messages were later deleted.
When people tried to access Dasgupta's account, a message read, "Caution: This account is temporarily restricted. You're seeing this warning because there has been some unusual activity from this account. Do you still want to view it?"
When users went ahead to see the profile, they could see nothing but promoted posts.
Ram Madhav's account displayed a message saying, "Your account has been hacked by Turkish cyber army Ayyildiz Tim. Your DM correspondence and important data have been captured. I Love Pakistan."
After the accounts were hacked, #AnupamKher became one of the top trending hashtags on the micro-blogging site with 1,221 tweets bearing the actors name.
On January 14 this year, two photographs of the Pakistani flag and Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain were posted from the Twitter account of India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Syed Akbaruddin’s hacked account. It was later restored along with his blue tick and the tweets posted by the hackers were also removed.
(With ANI and IANS inputs)