From last few time back many social media have been experiencing threats and attacks from the hackers. Just recently hacktivist exposed the data of nearly 50 million Facebook users. Last year too, Facebook faced so much of controversy and pressure after the details of 83million users were accessed to British analytics firm.
After Facebook, Instagram also got attacked. Some of the Instagrammer who falls in the prominent class lost access to their accounts in the recent wave of attacks. The report says the hacker asked for a ransom in Bitcoins to release the Instagram accounts. The pirates have targeted only to the profiles that have numbers of followers and credible social influence; those accounts allegedly belong to high profile users.
It has been found that the hackers had sent a message to the targeted user demanding a ransom to release the account possession. Otherwise, they threaten to remove the account. The copy of the letter that the victim received is mentioned below:
The motherboard discussed with several victims of this campaign. Almost every victim received a similar message from a hacker named “Pump.” The hacker’s plan seems to be the same in every case, cluing that all of the hacks link back to the same campaign.
As explained, all the victims were aware of the hack after noticing the email from the hackers. This took place alongside the receipt of the email from Instagram officials notifying of a change in the account email address. Nonetheless, the victims were unsuccessful when they attempted to revert the changes. Later on, the victims eventually paid the ransom as demanded by the hacktivist. Still, the hackers removed the accounts in some cases, such as, in the case of Kevin Kreider – a fitness-focused user.
Motherboard informed that till now Instagram hadn’t played any significant role to help the victims for recovering their accounts.
