The Instagram service was hacked recently. Instagram is actually owned by Facebook. Initially, this hack targeted some celebrities like Selena Gomez.
I personally don’t give a fuck about celebrities, however those are the alleged initial victims of an Instagram bug that was used to hack phone numbers and email addresses. Instagram, has remained quite secretive about how many actual users may have been hacked. They have refused to release numbers claiming that they do not know.
This bug allows anyone to potentially obtain an Instagram users email and or phone number, even if this information was private. The Chief Technology Officer at Instagram, Mike Krieger, claims that no other information such as passwords were stolen. This bug supposedly has since been fixed.
This company claims that they do not know what users were affected. A hacker initially provided a list of six million accounts where people could search for their email and or phone numbers. A Doxagram database was created that was searchable for just ten dollars.
As if I care bout some bread and circuses sell out email and phone number. This bug affected both verified and not verified Instagram accounts. Supposedly hackers have information for six million users.
Allegedly, there are around seven hundred million Instagram accounts created. However, exposing your email address and or phone number can be a serious matter. You can potentially socially engineer a hack of someones account with just those two afore mentioned pieces of information.
This is how supposedly Selena Gomez’s account was hacked. That Doxagram website is now offline. Some how the Daily Beast was given one thousand examples of these hacked accounts.
When they tried to create new Instagram accounts with hacked email addresses, they received messages that account(s) with those emails already existed. This bug was prevelent in Instagrams’ Application Programming Interface. Application Programming Interfaces are often used by external developers to access and then display certain information from that website directly onto their website.
The hacker that created Doxagram was using Bitcoin for his or her payment gateway. Apparently, the current puppet President of The United States official Instagram account was one of those hacked. Not that I fucking care about politics.