More than a week ago, the AI-powered chat assistant Meta unwittingly gave hackers access to thousands of Instagram accounts, including high-profile ones like cosmetics retailer Sephora and an unauthorized senior official of the US Space Force, as well as Barack Obama’s White House account.
The exact number was later revealed in a regulatory filing with the Maine attorney general’s office. The total stands at 20,225 compromised accounts (30 of which were Maine residents).
The hack, reported by 404 Media last week, was easy to pull off for account holders who didn’t enable two-factor authentication. Hackers simply ask an AI-powered bot to change the target account’s email address to their own. Once that’s allowed, the hackers ask for a password reset, prompting the AI to send a code to their email address. After the hackers confirmed the password reset, they were able to gain control of the account.
An edited step-by-step video of the process even appeared on X, showing how hackers use a VPN to make it appear that they are in the target area. There are times when hackers don’t even need a user’s email address or original password.
In an incident notification letter to Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, dated June 5, Meta acknowledged “a vulnerability in Instagram’s AI-assisted account recovery system … that was exploited by unauthorized third parties to perform password resets on Instagram user accounts.”
After the exploit was made public, many Instagram users reported to Reddit and X that their accounts had been hacked, although the scope of the hack was unclear at the time. A Meta spokesperson posted to X that the exploit was fixed as of June 1, shortly after the initial reports.
How did AI enable hacking?
The problem is probably due to Meta’s now AI-driven customer support. The tech giant made the change back in March, saying it would enable “24/7 help with account issues like updating your password and profile settings.”
But with an AI chatbot managing the entire process, people couldn’t step in when suspicious activity started. That allowed hackers to carry out social engineering-style attacks and pull it off multiple times before anyone noticed.
Affected accounts have been forcibly removed from all users and email addresses have been restored. Users are then prompted to reset their passwords and reconfirm their login. Meta says that once accounts are secured, a second notification will be sent to remind people to turn on two-factor authentication to prevent future attacks.
Meta has not yet responded to a request for comment.
How to protect yourself from similar attacks
The social engineering exploit had one major limitation: It didn’t work on accounts with multifactor authentication. Those accounts may already have a code in their authentication app of their choice or receive it via text. Without the MFA setting, the one-time reset code appears to be sent to the preferred email address, thus allowing criminals to have it.
The best way to protect yourself is to enable multifactor authentication, which is available on all Meta platforms. It it won’t protect you 100% of the timebut it is much better than password alone, and would protect against this exploit completely.
There are other things you can do to strengthen account securityincluding using passwords where available and a private email address to make your account information difficult to find.
