Pierluigi Paganini
August 31, 2017
Instagram has recently suffered a possibly serious data breach with hackers gaining access to the phone numbers and email addresses for many “high-profile” users.
Hackers recently accessed personal information of “high-profile” users, including phone numbers and email addresses.
The stolen data could be used by hackers to target victims with social engineering attack aimed to access their accounts and leak their video and photos.
The data breach affected a number of Instagram service, Facebook-owned company has notified all of its verified users the hack.
An unknown hacker has exploited a bug in the application and accessed some of their profile data.
The vulnerability affects the Instagram application programming interface (API) that is used to interact with other apps.
The company did not provide details about the flaw exploited by the hacker, the company has promptly patched it and started an investigation into the incident.
“We recently discovered that one or more individuals obtained unlawful access to a number of high-profile Instagram users’ contact information—specifically email address and phone number—by exploiting a bug in an Instagram API,” reads a statement issued by Instagram.
“No account passwords were exposed. We fixed the bug swiftly and are running a thorough investigation.”
The company did not reveal the name of the high-profile users that have been affected by the data breach. Experts speculate that the recent hack of Selena Gomez’s Instagram account was linked to the flaw exploited by the hacker, the company did comment the hack.
The company notified all verified users of the hack via an email and also warned of possible phishing and social engineering attacks via email, phone calls, and text messages.
Let me suggest to enable two-factor verification on your accounts, start adopting strong passwords, don’t share same credentials on different accounts, be vigilant on suspicious and unsolicited emails.
