Pirates offer to sell millions of Instagram accounts
A group of hackers used a hole discovered a few days ago in the Integrator application to steal phone numbers and e-mail addresses of about six million people, and now offer to sell that information online for ten dollars.
Pirates have mainly targeted celebrity accounts and authenticated users, such as accountant Selena Gomez, who broke out two days ago and exploited the intruder to insert nude photographs of her former boyfriend Justin Bieber to nearly 125 million followers.
A list of thousands of well-known personalities such as artists, sports stars and media personalities was sent to the Daily News website. The hackers also stole account information for undocumented users, and now offer that large inventory of data for sale for $ 10.
The technology website Ars Technica reported pirates as saying they had already stolen $ 500, meaning that 50 people had paid $ 10 each for the data. According to them, the process of mechanism allowed them to steal information from one million accounts per hour, and did not fix the entanglement gap only after 12 hours of exploitation, enabling hackers to access six million accounts.
While acknowledging the gap, Entgram said it had quickly corrected the number of accounts affected. "Although we can not determine which accounts have been affected, we think it is a small percentage of the accounts of Instagram," she said.
It has about 700 million accounts, and six million is not a small figure, especially if stolen information contains phone numbers and e-mail for the most popular users on Instagram.
However, it appears that the site of "Duxagram", which sells information via hackers is currently idle, and it is unclear whether this was the result of the efforts of Entgram to close the site. But even when it is closed, pirates can sell contact information to users in other ways, and information is now likely to be spread over the Internet.
The loophole reveals a weakness in the InStagram system, and the Facebook-owned company will have to take further measures to increase the security of celebrity accounts and other users.