Search results for Instagram account hack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

Instagram has been hit by a widespread hacking campaign that appears to stem from Russia and have affected hundreds of users over the past week, leaving them locked out of their accounts. A growing number of Instagram users are taking to social media, including Twitter and Reddit, to report a mysterious hack which involves locking them out of their account with their email addresses changed to .ru domains. According to victims, their account names, profile pictures, passwords, email addresses associated with their Instagram accounts, and even connected Facebook accounts are being changed in the attack. Many of the affected Instagram users are also complaining about their profile photos replaced with stills from popular films, including Despicable Me 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean. Although it is still unknown who is behind the widespread hack of Instagram accounts, the use of the email addresses originating from Russian email provider mail.ru may indicate a Russian hacker or...

Watch out! Facebook-owned photo-sharing service has recently patched a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to compromise any Instagram account without requiring any interaction from the targeted users. Instagram is growing quickly—and with the most popular social media network in the world after Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user engagement and interactions. Despite having advanced security mechanisms in place, bigger platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Instagram are not completely immune to hackers and contain severe vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities have recently been patched , some are still under the process of being fixed, and many others most likely do exist, but haven't been found just yet. Details of one such critical vulnerability in Instagram surfaced today on the Internet that could have allowed a remote attacker to reset the password for any Instagram account and take complete contr...

The highest followers account on Instagram owned by Selena Gomez has recently been hacked with unknown hackers posting a bunch of nude photographs of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber on her account. The latest hack is not part of the ongoing Fappening events affecting a majority of celebrities by targeting their iCloud accounts, rather in the case of Selena, some hacker managed to breach her Instagram account and posted Bieber's photos. Bieber's three full-frontal shots of naked photos were visible to Selena's 125 million Instagram followers for a short duration of time, after which her account was swiftly taken down Monday night. A post from Selena's official Instagram account went up Monday showing 3 pics of Bieber with a caption that read: "LOOK AT THIS N***A LIL SHRIMPY." Selena's team has since re-secured her Instagram account, which was back online minutes after it was taken down, with the photos of Bieber deleted. The Bieber nude images...

It's now official, Instagram has suffered a massive data breach , and reportedly an unknown hacker has stolen personal details of more than 6 million Instagram accounts. Just yesterday, we reported that Instagram had patched a critical API vulnerability that allowed the attacker to access phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile verified accounts. However, Instagram hack now appears to be more serious than initially reported. Not just a few thousands of high-profile users—it's more than 6 million Instagram users, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies, who have had their Instagram profile information, including email addresses and phone numbers, available for sale on a website, called Doxagram . The suspected Instagram hacker has launched Doxagram, an Instagram lookup service, where anyone can search for stolen information only for $10 per account. A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, who also found the same vulnerability and rep...

The very popular Pop star Taylor Swift became the latest celebrity to have their social media accounts hacked on Tuesday. The 25-year-old " Shake It Off " singer, who has the fourth-most popular Twitter account with 51.4 million followers, appeared to be asking her millions of followers to follow @veriuser and @lizzard. Swift confirmed that her Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked on Tuesday afternoon, and also that the rogue posts were quickly removed from the social media websites. " My Twitter got hacked but don't worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords ," said a statement posted on Swift's personal Tumblr page. The accounts were taken for just 15 minutes, but when it belongs to Taylor Swift, that makes it a big hit. At the time, a Tweet went out from @TaylorSwift13 to her millions of fans, saying, " go follow my boy, @lizzard :) " Yes Li...

Are you curious about who viewed your profile on Instagram? This is probably the most frequently asked question nowadays, and there are several applications available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store, which claims to offer you the opportunity to see who is looking at your Instagram profile. But, should we believe them? Is there really some kind of way out to know who viewed your Instagram profile? The shortest answer to all these questions is ' NO ', such functionality does not exist on Instagram at the moment. But, thousands of users still have hope and hackers are taking advantage of this to target a broad audience. Recently, security researchers have discovered some malicious applications on Android Google Play Store as well as iOS App Store, which are entirely a hoax, targeting Instagram users. The iOS app is named " InstaCare - Who cares with me? " and is one of the top apps in Germany, while the Android app is dubbed ...

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...

' Nir Goldshlager ' known as Facebook hacker and founder of Break Security  , who reported many critical bugs in Facebook OAuth mechanism in past few months, today disclose a critical  vulnerability in Instagram Oauth that allow an attacker to hack any account. Succesful hack allows attacker to access private photos, ability to delete victim's photos and to edit comments and also the ability to post new photos. Hacker explained that there are two ways to hack Instagram accounts using OAuth, first via Hijack Instagram accounts using the Instagram OAuth or Hijack Instagram accounts using the Facebook OAuth Dialog. During his bug hunting Nir found loopholes in Instagram's security parameters i.e redirect_uri , that allows  attacker to pass the access token to his own domain with mx as suffix i.e code straight to breaksec.com.mx . POC :  https://instagram.com/oauth/authorize/?client_id=33221863eec546659f2564dd71a8a38d&redirec...

Ever wonder how to hack Instagram or how to hack a facebook account? Well, someone just did it! But, remember, even responsibly reporting a security vulnerability could end up in taking legal actions against you. An independent security researcher claims he was threatened by Facebook after he responsibly revealed a series of security vulnerabilities and configuration flaws that allowed him to successfully gained access to sensitive data stored on Instagram servers , including: Source Code of Instagram website SSL Certificates and Private Keys for Instagram Keys used to sign authentication cookies Personal details of Instagram Users and Employees Email server credentials Keys for over a half-dozen critical other functions However, instead of paying him a reward, Facebook has threatened to sue the researcher of intentionally withholding flaws and information from its team. Wesley Weinberg , a senior security researcher at Synack, participated in Facebook's b...

If you also found yourself logged out of Facebook on Friday, you are not alone. Facebook forced more than 90 million users to log out and back into their accounts in response to a massive data breach. On Friday afternoon, the social media giant disclosed that some unknown hackers managed to exploit three vulnerabilities in its website and steal data from 50 million users and that as a precaution, the company reset access tokens for nearly 90 million Facebook users. We covered a story yesterday based upon the information available at that time. Facebook Hack: 10 Important Updates You Need To Know About However, in a conference call [ Transcript 1 , Transcript 2 ] with reporters, Facebook vice president of product Guy Rosen shared a few more details of the terrible breach, which is believed to be the most significant security blunder in Facebook's history. Here's below we have briefed the new developments in the Facebook data breach incident that you need to know abo...

Instagram has recently patched a security issue in its website that might have accidentally exposed some of its users' passwords in plain text. The company recently started notifying affected users of a security bug that resides in a newly offered feature called "Download Your Data" that allows users to download a copy of their data shared on the social media platform, including photos, comments, posts, and other information that they have shared on the platform. To prevent unauthorized users from getting their hands on your personal data, the feature asks you to reconfirm your password before downloading the data. However, according to Instagram, the plaintext passwords for some users who had used the Download Your Data feature were included in the URL and also stored on Facebook's servers due to a security bug that was discovered by the Instagram internal team. The company said the stored data has been deleted from the servers owned by Facebook, Instagra...

Microsoft has awarded an independent security researcher $50,000 as part of its bug bounty program for reporting a flaw that could have allowed a malicious actor to hijack users' accounts without their knowledge. Reported by Laxman Muthiyah, the vulnerability aims to brute-force the seven-digit security code that's sent to a user's email address or mobile number to corroborate his (or her) identity before resetting the password in order to recover access to the account. Put differently, the account takeover scenario is a consequence of privilege escalation stemming from an authentication bypass at an endpoint which is used to verify the codes sent as part of the  account recovery process . The company addressed the issue in November 2020, before details of the flaw came to light on Tuesday. Although there are encryption barriers and rate-limiting checks designed to prevent an attacker from repeatedly submitting all the 10 million combinations of the codes in an automa...

The man who runs the biggest social network and continuously implements new security measures to boost its billion users security, himself failed to follow basics of Internet security for his own online accounts. Yes, I'm talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , who had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts compromised on Sunday. The hacker group from Saudi Arabia, dubbed OurMine , claimed responsibility for the hack and guess how the group did it? Thanks to the LinkedIn data breach ! The hackers tweeted that they found Zuck's account credentials in the recent LinkedIn data breach, from which they took his SHA1-hashed password string and then broke it and tried on several social media accounts. Also Read: Hacker Removed Zuckerberg's Facebook Cover Photo The group, which has more than 40,000 Twitter followers, then successfully broke into Zuck's Twitter ( @finkd ) and Pinterest profile and defaced its banners with its logo as well as tweeted out some offens...

Here we have great news for all bug bounty hunters. Now you can get paid up to $40,000 for finding and responsibly reporting critical vulnerabilities in the websites and mobile applications owned by Facebook that could allow cyber attackers to take over user accounts. In the latest post published Tuesday on the Facebook page, the social networking giant announced that it has raised the monetary reward for account takeover vulnerabilities to encourage security researchers and bug bounty hunters in helping Facebook to fix high impact issues before nefarious hackers exploit them. The announcement says: Cybersecurity researchers who find security vulnerabilities in any products owned by Facebook , including Instagram , WhatsApp , and Oculus , that can lead to a full account takeover, including access tokens leakage or the ability to access users' valid sessions, will be rewarded an average bounty of: $40,000 reward—if user interaction is not required at all $25,000 reward—...

Smart hackers could exploit a loophole that could allow them to steal a significant amount of cash from Google, Microsoft and Instagram using a Premium rate phone number. Security researcher Arne Swinnen from Belgium has discovered an ingenious way to steal money from big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Instagram using their two-factor authentication (2FA) voice-based token distribution systems. Swinnen argues that any attacker with malicious intent could create fake Google, Microsoft or Instagram accounts, as well as premium phone services, and then link them together. The attacker could then request 2FA voice-based tokens for all fake accounts using an automated scripts, placing legitimate phone calls to his service to earn him quite a nice profit. Swinnen created accounts on Google, Microsoft Office 365 and Instagram and then tied them to a premium phone number instead of a regular one. As a result, whenever one of these three services would call the account...

And the hacks just keep on coming. Timehop social media app has been hit by a major data breach on July 4th that compromised the personal data of its more than 21 million users. Timehop is a simple social media app that collects your old photos and posts from your iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare and acts as a digital time machine to help you find—what you were doing on this very day exactly a year ago. The company revealed on Sunday that unknown attacker(s) managed to break into its Cloud Computing Environment and access the data of entire 21 million users, including their names, email addresses, and approximately 4.7 million phone numbers attached to their accounts. "We learned of the breach while it was still in progress, and were able to interrupt it, but data was taken. Some data was breached," the company wrote in a security advisory posted on its website. Social Media OAuth2 Tokens Also Compromised Moreover, the attackers also got th...