A crafty white hat hacker finds a way to reset the password of any Instagram account, then he tells Facebook security so they can stop the bad guys from doing it.
Share to twitterA professional hacker discovered what he considered a fairly simple way to seize control of any Instagram user's account. Fortunately for the site's 500 million active daily users, he told Instagram exactly how it could be done.
A six-digit code is child's play for a hacker with any amount of computing power at their disposal, which is why Instagram has a system in place that can detect brute-force attacks. Muthiyah found that out of 1,000 attempts around 75% were blocked. He bombarded Instagram with 200,000 codes from 1,000 different IP addresses. That might sound like a Herculean task, butIn his estimation it would have cost about $150 to reset anyone's password.
Gaining control of an account with hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of followers is well worth the investment. It provides an opportunity to spam users with links to infected downloads or phishing pages from an account they are likely to trust. That trust increases the odds of a successful attack.
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