Skip to main content

This Flaw Could Have Allowed Hackers to Hack Any Instagram Account Within 10 Minutes

how to hack instagram password
Watch out! Facebook-owned photo-sharing service has recently patched a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to compromise any Instagram account without requiring any interaction from the targeted users.

Instagram is growing quickly—and with the most popular social media network in the world after Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user engagement and interactions.

Despite having advanced security mechanisms in place, bigger platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Instagram are not completely immune to hackers and contain severe vulnerabilities.

 Some vulnerabilities have recently been patched, some are still under the process of being fixed, and many others most likely do exist, but haven't been found just yet.

Details of one such critical vulnerability in Instagram surfaced today on the Internet that could have allowed a remote attacker to reset the password for any Instagram account and take complete control over it.

Discovered and responsibly reported by Indian bug bounty hunter Laxman Muthiyah, the vulnerability resided in the password recovery mechanism implemented by the mobile version of Instagram.

The "password reset" or "password recovery" is a feature that allows users to regain access to their account on a website in case they forgot their password.

 On Instagram, users have to confirm a six-digit secret passcode (that expires after 10 minutes) sent to their associated mobile number or email account in order to prove their identity.

That means, one out of a million combinations can unlock any Instagram account using brute force attack, but it is not as simple as it sounds, because Instagram has rate-limiting enabled to prevent such attacks.

 However, Laxman found that this rate limiting can be bypassed by sending brute force requests from different IP addresses and leveraging race condition, sending concurrent requests to process multiple attempts simultaneously.

"Race hazard (concurrent requests) and IP rotation allowed me to bypass it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible. 10 minutes expiry time is the key to their rate limiting mechanism, that's why they didn't enforce permanent blocking of codes," Laxman told The Hacker News.

As shown in the above video demonstration, Laxman successfully demonstrated the vulnerability to hijack an Instagram account by quickly attempting 200,000 different passcode combinations (20% of all) without getting blocked.

"In a real attack scenario, the attacker needs 5000 IPs to hack an account. It sounds big, but that's actually easy if you use a cloud service provider like Amazon or Google. It would cost around 150 dollars to perform the complete attack of one million codes."

Laxman has also released a proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability, which has now been patched by Instagram, and the company awarded Laxman with $30,000 reward as part of its bug bounty program.

To protect your accounts against several types of online attacks, as well to reduce your chances of being compromised where attackers directly target vulnerable applications, users are highly recommended to enable "two-factor authentication," which could prevent hackers from accessing your accounts even if they somehow manage to steal your passwords.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Be fraud aware - What are phishing, smishing and vishing.

  You may have heard the terms phishing, smishing or vishing before, but what exactly do they mean? At their core, all three terms are a type of financial fraud which tricks unsuspecting victims into giving out sensitive personal information, handing over money or installing malware onto their device. The only difference between each term is the channel via which you can be targeted; phishing refers to scam emails, smishing refers to scam text or WhatsApp messages and vishing takes place over the phone. Phishing The most common phishing method encourages victims to visit a malicious website through a fake email message, which appears to be sent from a legitimate company or source (e.g. from a bank, HMRC, a delivery company or the NHS). For example, you might receive an email which appears to be from an organisation who you’re familiar with, asking you to click on a link. At this point you will be taken to a webpage on which you’re asked to submit sensitive data, such as passwords, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Cybersecurity Enables Government, Health, EduTech Cope With COVID-19

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact on our society has resulted in many dramatic changes to how people are traveling, interacting with each other, and collaborating at work. There are several trends taking place as a consequence of the outbreak, which has only continued to heighten the need for the tightest possible cybersecurity. Tools for Collaboration There has been a massive spike in the adoption of Tools for Collaboration as a consequence of COVID-19. Concerns about the coronavirus have caused an enormous increase in remote working, with many organizations requiring or at least encouraging their workers to stay at home—especially when cities, states, and even some entire nations are ultimately into lock down in a bid to spread the stem of the disease. Meanwhile, with millions working from home for many weeks now, there has been a spike in the video conferencing and online collaboration software, many of which are fortunately entirely free, allowing organizations...
Post a Comment
Read more

March – Threat Intelligence Bulletin

Top Attacks and Breaches Global fear of the Corona virus epidemic continues to be exploited for malicious cyber operations. Check Point Research  reports  of thousands of newly registered coronavirus related domains, which are 50% more likely malicious than other domains. CPR also informed of a Trickbot campaign using a fake health warning document to target Italian users. Colorado based space and defense parts manufacturer, Visser Precision, has fallen victim to a DoppelPaymer  ransomware  Information stolen from Visser and its customers, including Tesla, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Boeing, has been published online in  another  attempt to extort ransom payment. An unidentified demographic and financial information database, hosted on Google cloud, has been left  unsecured  for more than a month. Containing over 200 million records, the exposed information included name, address, email address, credit rating, income, net worth property ...
Post a Comment
Read more