Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone.
People losing handles theyโve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands.
I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I havenโt been in years.
Obama White House account got hit.
These arenโt some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised.
The thing is the exploit is so simple itโs almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the targetโs location (which now you can find on the about section of the page).
Instagramโs AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie.
They grab a photo from the targetโs profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the personโs face moving around, upload that to Metaโs AI as proof.
And Metaโs AI just accepts it because it canโt tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someoneโs face
.
Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I donโt know exactly how, just that it did.
Point is even locked down accounts went down.
Then you try to recover your account and youโre talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help.
You canโt escalate to a human. Youโre just stuck. Your asset is gone and thereโs no one to call.
The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop.
One AI fooling another AI while thereโs literally no person anywhere to catch it.
Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute.
Now thankfully itโs patched but I donโt think it will be the last one. Stay safe!