Has Instagram Been HACKED? Hundreds of Users Are Left Unable To Login To The App Amid Fears Russian Cyber Criminals Have Stolen Access to Accounts
It’s bad enough having my private insta account hacked & not being in control
It\'s not yet clear how or why the attack has been launched, but it will ring alarm bells after allegations hackers under the direction of President Putin targeted Facebook Photo Credit : DailyMail
Instagram users have taken to social media to complain that their accounts have been hacked, with some claiming Russian cybercriminals are behind the attack.
Fans of the picture sharing site have found themselves locked out of their accounts, with their email addresses and access passwords changed.
It's not yet clear how or why the attack has been launched, but it will ring alarm bells after allegations hackers under the direction of President Putin targeted Facebook.
Twitter user Ale Scarpa was one of the first to raise the alarm to the attack.
Writing on the site, he said: 'Some Russian man hacked my Instagram!
'I can’t contact in any way. I tried to email Instagram but that was not possible.'
When Instagram eventually replied, they informed Ale Scarpa was informed that the account password and email had been changed in early August to a mail.ru account, a popular Russian language web based email hosting service.
A spike in reports of cyber-attacks on Instagram has appeared on various social sites in recent days.
Mashable reports that Twitter users have tweeted Instagram's account with the word 'hack' 798 times in August, compared to 40 times in July.
A similar jump has been reported on Reddit and other social sites. #Searching Google Trends revealed a spike for the term 'Instagram hack' performed worldwide on the search site.
According to the site one Instagram user, Krista, who has more than 4,500 followers on her fitness account, noticed on Saturday evening that she had been logged out of her account.
Trying to regain access also revealed that her login email address had also been changed to a .ru domain.
This appears to be a common trend among those affected.
A number of disgruntled Instagram users have have shared their displeasure at losing access to their accounts online.
Writing on Twitter, Karen Hughes said: 'It’s bad enough having my private insta account hacked & not being in control of removing photographs of my daughter without it being very nearly impossible to contact or report the problem!'
Gaby Estrella added: 'If anyone follows me on Instagram, please go and report the account!!!! Someone has hacked it and changed all my info.
'The username to my account is now machizuge. Please report this guy so the account gets deleted! Thanks guys!'
Sam Healey wrote: 'My Instagram account was hacked yesterday, they have changed my email, password and username!
'How can I get control of my account back, I've emailed your support team but so far they have been unhelpful! Please help!'
Abigail Nowak added: '@POTUS thousands of @instagram accounts are being hacked by Russians.
'We know this because we see the ending email .ru. Instagram is cowardly and unresponsive, an imposter has access of copyrighted, personal material that’s not okay for them to ignore this MASSIVE ISSUE.'
It's not yet clear how the hackers have accessed the affected accounts.
Many have seen their public handle and avatar changed, often to an animated gif from Disney and Pixar films, as well as their bios and photos deleted.
Most of the affected account did not have two-factor authentication enabled, but some hacked accounts were using the advanced protection method.
The additional measure didn't protect Chris Woznicki, according to Mashable, who was using two-factor authentication when his account was hacked.
Instagram did contact him to inform him that his email address had been changed and that two-factor authentication had been disabled.
However, by this point he had already been locked out of his account.
This article originally appeared on : DailyMail
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