Meta says roughly 20,000 Instagram accounts may have been hacked in a recent attack abusing an AI-powered account recovery support tool.
Hackers compromised many Instagram accounts simply by asking Meta’s chatbot to link their own email address to the targeted account. This enabled the hackers to reset the account password and take control of it.
Many high-profile accounts were reportedly compromised and sold on the dark web. The list of impacted accounts included those of the Obama White House, Sephora, and US Space Force Chief Master Sergeant John Bentivegna.
Some cybercriminals shared videos and instructions on how the attack worked.
Meta is now informing authorities about the incident’s impact, telling the Maine Attorney General’s Office that the total number of potentially affected individuals is 20,225.
However, Amber Hannah, Meta’s associate general counsel for incident response legal, indicated that the total number could actually be smaller. The company has counted users who had their passwords reset via the support tool, did not have 2FA enabled, and whose accounts were likely accessed by hackers. However, some of these accounts may have been accessed by their legitimate owners rather than hackers.
Meta’s disclosure to the Maine AG reveals that the exploitation of its High Touch Support (HTS) tool was discovered on May 31.
The tool is designed to help users regain access to accounts after they have been locked out, and hackers abused a vulnerability in the tool to reset Instagram passwords.
“Users can request support from HTS and, as part of that process, can ask that a password reset link be sent to their email address. The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account.
As a result, when an individual provided an email address not previously associated with the account, the system incorrectly sent a password reset link to that unassociated email rather than rejecting the request. This allowed unauthorized third parties to receive a password reset link for accounts they did not own. Upon resetting the password, the unauthorized party was able to log in to the account if the account holder had not enabled two-factor authentication (2FA).”
Meta said it’s unclear whether personal information stored in the compromised accounts was accessed. However, the attackers could have obtained profile information, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, direct messages, social media posts, and information on account activity and interaction history.
The social media giant has disabled the abused tool and will re-enable it only after ensuring that the vulnerability has been fixed.
The password reset links generated by exploiting the vulnerability have been invalidated. In addition, affected accounts have been enrolled in a mandatory security checkpoint and their passwords have been reset.
“As soon as practical, Meta intends to send user notifications to the potentially impacted users to inform them of this incident, recommend that they review their account security settings, and enable 2FA,” Hannah said.
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