Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; February 8, 2018)

Twitter saw intense activity yesterday as a group of hackers, by the name of Turkish Cyber Army, hacked into the accounts of two Bollywood actors, Abhishek Bachchan and Nimrat Kaur. The same group had earlier hacked veteran Anupam Kher’s Twitter account.

Recounting her ordeal, Nimrat told mid-day that she found her account compromised when she opened a direct message (DM) sent to her. “I opened the message and the next thing I know is that the access to my account was gone. This happened on Tuesday night. Through the night, the hackers tried to break into my Gmail and Instagram accounts. I kept getting notifications. I didn’t consider taking up the matter with the cops because Twitter was at work on this.”

After she notified the Twitter Support Centre, she gained access to her account last evening. However, her relief was short-lived as the account was hacked again, in a matter of hours.

Bachchan was a tad more fortunate than Kaur. While the verification tick on his account had vanished and his timeline had several tweets in Turkish as a result of the hacking, the support centre promptly restored his account by evening. In his trademark witty style, Bachchan tweeted, “Yes, yes my account got hacked. Quite chuffed that they thought me interesting enough actually...”( sic).