PETALING JAYA: The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) is back on Twitter under a new handle – @MCMC_RASMI – six months after it claimed its original account was hacked.

MCMC sent out its first tweet using the new account, which now has over 300 followers, on July 5.

"In January, MCMC announced that it had to temporarily suspend its previous account, @SKMM_MCMC, after it was allegedly hacked. The account had over 70,000 followers.

This means that, if you had someone's email address or phone number, you could easily find out whether a Twitter account was tied to that address or number. Say you had Elon Musk's address and checked this, and realized that he had an account that was different from the one he usually tweets from – boom, you've just found his secret account. Not great for anyone who wanted to tweet anonymously and/or privately.

The last tweet from the account before it was deactivated was a statement saying that MCMC will monitor social media for misinformation in regards to the 3Rs – royalty, race and religion.

The account was then inundated with posts of screenshots of what appeared to be old tweets from MCMC's account, mostly from 2014. The messages in screenshots were mostly offensive.

This caused the #MCMC hashtag to become one of Twitter’s trending topics, prompting the regulatory body to release a statement in which it claimed that the "suspicious, ugly and defamatory" messages were not from MCMC.

On Jan 13, Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah initiated an investigation to take action against parties involved in the issue.

In April, he announced that the Committee for the Investigation of Indecent Remarks Cases 2014 may need assistance from external authorities on the matter.

However, the committee faced constraints as individuals allegedly involved in the issue were no longer working with MCMC, he said, adding that the committee had no jurisdiction to investigate.

"So I have instructed secretary-general Datuk Seri Mohammad Mentek to look into the possibility of seeking help from authorities outside the ministry to resolve this problem," he said in a report.