Hacking a social media account is not very hard in this AI era. Yesterday, some of the big celebrities’ accounts, like Barack Obama’s White House account and the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, were compromised with a little trick, and the hackers gained total access to the accounts by changing the passwords.
Credits : 404 Media
Let’s see how it happened. Attackers simply identified the targeted person’s location and spoofed the location with a VPN, then tried to login to their Instagram account with the help of Meta AI assistant by telling the assistant to change the email of the targeted account, and it was allowing the user to change the email address. Through that, attackers were easily able to reset the passwords and gain total access of the accounts.
The vulnerability had been in Instagram for months. It only got attention when the big accounts were compromised. Later, Meta intervened and fixed the vulnerability, and they were unaware of how many accounts had been compromised.
To protect your accounts from this type of attack, use MFA, including SMS-based authentication, and review your recovery email and phone number periodically, and also monitor the login alerts of your account, so that we can protect our social presence.
