UncategorizedWhat surprised me this morning is reading an article at some portal saying a group of hackers used creative trick to hack thousands of Instagram accounts in like few weeks.
Now you might ask yourself how it can be possible with all of security systems which Instagram and Facebook (Company who owns it) invested into providing their servers safe. What they did is they created application with “brute-force” method to hack accounts called “Extreme Programming”. This method functions with system of attacking login page with all possible password combinations of various symbols, letters and numbers. It takes time until a true matching one is hit. But since this is done by software and not human, the process takes much less time to complete. It all depends of computers CPU’s process, so technicians assume those hackers own a super fast computer since they managed to break inside thousand of profiles in just few weeks of time.
They got busted because majority of users complained to Instagram for losing their accounts, and since it’s about huge number, IG’s specialists tracked out from where those attacks were coming from. After scanning deeply trough several loop connected IP addresses they finally managed to detect real location and address of attacker. Guess from where? Attackers were Russians, again.
They targeted accounts with large numbers of followers and used them to promote their affiliated products. Now after all of them got returned to their real owners, Instagram published their tips to prevent got hacking again. And all of these profiles had one thing in common: Users had weak made passwords inside them.
So to prevent your IG account from getting hacked by method like this one, make your password strong. Means you need to use many different types of characters: Uppercase plus lowercase letters, numbers and add some special symbols. This will prevent brute-force applications to crack down your accounts because it will need years of non-stop running them to match right working password to login.
