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How to hack an Instagram account? The answer to this question is difficult to find, but a bug bounty hunter just did it without too many difficulties. Belgian bug bounty hunter Arne Swinnen discovered two vulnerabilities in image-sharing social network Instagram that allowed him to brute-force Instagram account passwords and take over user accounts with minimal efforts. Both brute-force attack issues were exploitable due to Instagram's weak password policies and its practice of using incremental user IDs. "This could have allowed an attacker to compromise many accounts without any user interaction, including high-profile ones," Swinnen wrote in a blog post describing details of both vulnerabilities. Brute-Force Attack Using Mobile Login API Swinnen discovered that an attacker could have performed brute force attack against any Instagram account via its Android authentication API URL, due to improper security implementations. According to his blog post , fo...

" Talent has no Age Limit " That's what I said for a 10-year-old Finnish boy on our official Facebook page while sharing his recent achievement with our readers i.e. Winning $10,000 bug bounty from Instagram . Last Tuesday when we at The Hacker News first acknowledged this talented boy and the flaw he discovered in image-sharing social network Instagram, I did not have an idea that the Facebook post would get an enormous response from our followers, encouraging me to introduce Jani to our website readers too. Those who aren't aware, Jani from Helsinki recently reported an Instagram bug to Facebook that allowed him to delete other Instagram users' comments just by entering a malicious code into the app's comment field. " I would have been able to eliminate anyone's comment from Instagram, even Justin Bieber, " Jani told a local newspaper. Jani responsibly disclosed the vulnerability details to Facebook, who owns Instagram, in February and ...

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Hijacking an online account is not a complicated procedure, not at least in 2016. Today, Instagram confirmed that the company is in the process to roll out two-factor authentication for its 400 Million users. It is impossible to make your online accounts hack-proof, but you can make them less vulnerable. Then what you can do to protect yourselves from hackers? Several companies provide more enhanced steps like Encrypted Channel Services, Security Questions, Strict Password Policy and so on. But, what would you do if a hacker had somehow managed to access your accounts' passwords? Since the online accounts do not have an intelligent agent inbuilt to verify whether the person is the legit driver of the account; beyond a username and password match. Hence the concept of Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) born out! Jumbos like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have already blended the 2FA feature with their services to tackle account hijacking. 2-F...

Your Instagram is not as Private as You Think. Millions of private Instagram photos may have been exposed publicly on the web until the company patched a privacy hole this weekend. Instagram team was unaware of a security vulnerability from long time which allowed anyone with access to an image's URL to view the photo, even those shared by users whose accounts are set to "private." In other words, If a private user shares an Instagram post with another service, such as Twitter or Facebook as part of the upload process, that shared photo will remain viewable to the public despite its privacy settings. The flaw was first reported by  David Yanofsky  at Quartz and Instagram acknowledged the issue last week before patching the flaw. In a statement to Quartz, an Instagram representative said: ' If you choose to share a specific piece of content from your account publicly, that link remains public but the account itself is still private, ' The Instagram...

Two days ago, we reported at The Hacker News about a critical issue in the most popular image and video sharing service, Instagram app for mobiles , that allows an attacker to hijack users' account and successfully access private photos, delete victim's photos, edit comments and also post new images. Yesterday, a London developer Stevie Graham has released a tool called " Instasheep " a play on the 2010 Facebook stealer Firesheep , a Firefox extension that can be used to compromise online accounts in certain circumstances automatically using a click of mouse. Graham discovered the Instagram issue years ago and was shocked when he realized it hadn't been fixed by Facebook yet. He released the tool after claiming Facebook refused to pay a bug bounty for his reported vulnerabilities affecting the Instagram iOS mobile application. Graham tweeted about the issue: " Denied bug bounty. Next step is to write automated tool enabling mass hijacking of accounts, " he wrote. " ...

In the era of Government surveillance, ensuring the security and safety of our private communications regardless of platform – email, VOIP, message, even cookies stored – should be the top priority of the Internet industry. Some industry came together to offer Encryption as the protection against government surveillance, but some left security holes that may expose your personal data. A critical issue on Instagram's Android Application has been disclosed by a security researcher that could allow an attacker to hijack users' account and successfully access private photos, delete victim's photos, edit comments and also post new images. Instagram , acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion, is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. ...

Today, the estimated number of known computer threats like viruses, worms, backdoors, exploits, Trojans, spyware, password stealers, and other variants of potentially unwanted software range into millions. It has ability to create several different forms of itself dynamically in order to thwart antimalware programs. Instagram users are also targeted by the potentially unwanted software programs that claims to enable them to download their Instagram photos and videos using desktop machines or computers. But once downloaded and installed into system, it could expose the user to a number of security vulnerabilities, often overlap with adware , warned the security firm Malwarebytes. " In the case of Instagram, what we've seen out there could pose greater risk than, say, your average phishing site, " said Malwarebytes intelligence analyst Jovi Umawing in a blog post . Instagram is a social networking service use for online photo-sharing and video-sharing. It...

Instagram - Facebook's popular photo sharing app for iOS, is currently has a vulnerability that could make your account susceptible to hackers. A security researcher Carlos Reventlov  published on Friday another attack on Facebook's Instagram photo-sharing service that could allow a hacker to seize control of a victim's account. " The Instagram app communicates with the Instagram API via HTTP and HTTPs connections. Highly sensitive activities, such as login and editing profile data, are sent through a secure channel. However, some other request are sent through plain HTTP without a signature, those request could be exploited by an attacker connected to the same LAN of the victim's iPhone. " Vulnerability Details --   The vulnerability is in the 3.1.2 version of Instagram's application, which is  susceptible to "eavesdropping and man in the middle attacks that could lead an evil user to delete photos and download private media without the victim's con...