Official Twitter handle of Nepal’s Prime Minister’s Office hacked

Kathmandu, Mar 16 (PTI) The official Twitter handle of Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda’s Office, PMO Nepal, was hacked briefly on Thursday, and two unauthorised tweets were reposted from it, media reports said.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Twitter handle, with the username ‘@PM_nepal_’, was breached by hackers, and the account’s name was changed to ‘Blur’, The Kathmandu Post newspaper reported.

The hackers also reposted two tweets related to digital currency.

According to Prachanda’s secretary Ramesh Malla, the account was breached by hackers for some time, but the Twitter handle was restored, the report said.

The last official tweet from the PMO’s Twitter handle was posted on Wednesday.

Even after the account’s restoration, the unauthorised retweets were not removed, the report said.

Neither the PMO nor the Secretariat released official information about the breach, myRepublica newspaper reported.

“There has been a problem since yesterday. Some tweets have been retweeted as well. Technicians are trying to solve the problem. It will be resolved shortly,” the report quoted Prime Minister’s Press Coordinator Suryakiran Sharma as saying.

On January 28, hundreds of Nepalese government websites went down for hours in one of the largest cyberattacks in any country, exposing the Himalayan nation’s vulnerable cyber infrastructure, the report said.

The disruptions resulting from the hacking also hit international travel due to the shutdown of the immigration server.