Skip to main content

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How does my Instagram keep getting compromised?

Ask HN: How does my Instagram keep getting compromised?
144 by china | 86 comments on Hacker News.
I was an early Instagram user and got my nickname as my handle and I keep getting either locked out of my account or compromised altogether. Over the years, hackers have tried a number of things to steal my handle and I can usually tell how they get in. These days, I have no idea. I've been SIM swapped a handful of times. One time a hacker faxed a fake ID to Godaddy to try and swap out my domain to gain control of my email (they were successful). Now, I will try to log in to my account and will just be locked out. The email I created specifically for Instagram is not recognized, and there is no way to reset my password. I have two-factor auth on, I don't use the same password anywhere else, I change it regularly, etc. My current theory is there is some employee at Meta that's ultimately stealing the account. Does anybody have any idea how they're hacking me? PS: the worst part about all this is in order to get the handle back, I have to pull strings with folks I know at Meta, for a normal user, they would have absolutely no way of regaining access... [Update] Just got the account back and still have no idea how my email was removed from the account... [Update 2] Reviewing the security section I see a password reset email was sent to [username]@instagramz.com. No clue how or who changed the account email to that though.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery

Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery 173 by scythe | 29 comments on Hacker News. Recently there was a thread about a "breakthrough" in battery technology at Toyota. https://ift.tt/nUtv4yY Toyota has been putting out PR puff pieces about their "solid-state" (solid-electrolyte) batteries for years, but this story was unique in that it had a quote from Keiji Kaita, who holds some high-level role at Toyota. Anyway, I didn't think much of it, because there was no paper referenced in the Guardian article, which seemed to be the original source. But while reading about something else, I came across the paper "A near dimensionally invariable high-capacity positive electrode material", published in Nature Materials last December: https://ift.tt/24ZXPy5 This paper, reporting a cathode that has very little (much less than normal) change in size or shape when charged and discharged, claims reversible storage with a solid electrolyte. It stands to reaso...

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card

Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card 7 by bdominy | 1 comments on Hacker News. Neucards is an end-to-end encrypted contact information sharing and updating iOS app that protects your identity while letting you keep in touch with people. I started working on neucards as a side project more than ten years ago, and I decided three years ago to go full-time and try to build a community around it. There are two major problems that neucards addresses. First, most people end up with contact lists that are hopelessly out of date. Over time, people move, change jobs, or add social profiles and unless they tell you, chances are you could lose touch. Second, your contact information ends up in the wrong hands. There has been a huge increase in robocalls, unsolicited emails, data breaches, and online scams that is driven by accessing a person's contact info. Even worse, with AI now being able to imitate a person's voice or other mannerisms, knowledge about the connecti...