“Hi, we received a request to change your password on Instagram.” Sender of the email: an account that seems the official one of Instagram. If you have received this email in the last few days there are two pieces of information you should know: the first is that you’re not the only one. The second is that your account ended up inside a phishing campaignthat scam technique that aims to convince the victim to disseminate personal information.
If these two facts are certain, the problem now is to understand where does this email come from?. The header Cyber Security News talks about an Instagram leak, a security flaw on the platform that exposed the data of 17.5 million users. The information exposed would be a lot: username, connected email address, telephone number and home address.
Data images for sale on the dark web
Cyber Security News has published a series of screenshot coming from a dark web forum. We are talking about a forum that we have seen in many other cases of this kind. It is one of the main places to find archives linked to personal data. Here it is explained that the data released in recent days was recovered thanks to a scraping campaign occurred in the last months of 2024 thanks to an error in the APIs.
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To explain it briefly. Scraping campaigns are those operations in which a precise objective is not chosen but all the information that can be found from a specific source is recovered. APIs, so to speak, are the portions of code within a software that allow it to communicate with other software. The acronym stands for Application Programming Interface.
Instagram’s response
In the last few hours he has also intervened directly Instagram. A position that opens up a little mystery: he admits that emails are arriving but does not confirm the reconstruction of the data theft. These are the words: “We have resolved an issue that allowed an external party to request password reset emails for some users. There has been no breach of our systems and your Instagram accounts are protected.”
In any case, Meta’s advice for those who received the email is clear: “You can ignore these emails. We apologize for the mix-up.” We add another one: if you have received this email it is convenient for you to be safe reset your account password.
