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Jul 18, 2018  Once again, I laid out that I suspected my Instagram had been hacked, and that I was worried it may even have been deleted altogether. Unfortunately, Instagram. Feb 14, 2018  UPDATE 16/02/18: It seems that Instagram actually had a form to report your account has been hacked. This, however, disappeared sometime in the second half of. Aug 15, 2018  A widespread hacking campaign that appears to stem from Russia is affecting hundreds of Instagram users, leaving people locked out of their accounts. The hack sees Instagram. Let your followers know that your account has been hacked and that they should be vigilant of any suspicious activities. Hackers often use one compromised social media account as a stepping stone to hijack friends’ accounts. Log out of Instagram when you use a computer or phone you share with other people. This is a general security tip.

Having the best anti-virus solution is the baseline of any defensive cyber security solution. Make sure you are well protected and alert to all of the threats that are on the internet.

Google has become a big part of our day to day lives, most people have a google email account to access google play store and these credentials are often used in SSO (single Sign On) for other applications or services.

When so much information is stored within this google account what would you do if your account got hijacked, breached or compromised? This could potentially lock you out of a load of services and leave your social network open to abuse from a third party.

Dec 01, 2018  Like, Comment, Share, And Subscribe For More! So this tutorial will show you how to get your hacked or deactivated instagram back! Be sure to like the video and subscribe for more.

SO WHAT IF MY ACCOUNT WAS HACKED?!

Firstly, if your Instagram account has been hacked then there is a good chance your email has been hacked as well. What you would need to do first would be to report it to Instagram. If you are unable to log into Instagram but can still access the email address associated with the account, then you can go through the ‘forgot’ password process to recover your Instagram account and change the associated password. If you are unable to log onto your Instagram account then you can report the breach to Instagram via this link: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/196687840820038

You can indicate on the form that you no longer have access to your email account and provide an alternate email account that you do have access to.

If the email address associated with your Instagram account is your google account, hopefully, you can recover this account using the google account recovery process: https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery

Once you have secured your email account, recover your Instagram account and change your password to a secure password. Wherever possible make sure you are using MFA (multi-factor authentication) as an added layer of security.

Here are 6 things you can do to help keep your Instagram account safe:

1. Pick a strong password. Use a combination of at least six numbers, letters and punctuation marks (like! and &). It should be different from other passwords you use elsewhere on the internet.
2. Change your password regularly, especially if you see a message from Instagram asking you to do so. During automated security checks, Instagram sometimes recovers login information that was stolen from other sites. If Instagram detects that your password may have been stolen, changing your password on Instagram and other sites helps to keep your account secure and prevent you from being hacked in the future.
3. Never give your password to someone you don’t know and trust.
4. Make sure your email account is secure. Anyone who can read your email can probably also access your Instagram account. Change the passwords for all of your email accounts and make sure that no two is the same.
5. Log out of Instagram when you use a computer or phone you share with other people. Don’t check the “Remember Me” box when logging in from a public computer, as this will keep you logged in even after you close the browser window.
6. Think before you authorise any third-party app.

Other things to consider doing to limit your risks are:

Google security Checkup

1. Set a recovery phone and email.
   Check your recover email and phone settings. These are used in case you get locked out of your account. This should also send you an alert email to the recovery mail account if your account is logged onto by a non-trusted device.
2. If not already done so, Set up 2 factor authentication for Instagram.

WHAT IS 2 FACTOR AUTHENTICATION?

Two-factor authentication is a security feature. When two-factor authentication is on, every time you log into Instagram from an unknown device you’ll be asked to enter an SMS security code or backup code in addition to your username and password.

To turn two-factor authentication on:

Go to your profile and tap the cog (iOS) or the 3 dots (Android) in the top-right corner

Scroll down and tap Two-Factor Authentication

Tap the slider for Require Security Code to move to the on position

If your account doesn’t have a confirmed phone number, you’ll be asked to enter a phone number. After entering the phone number, tap Next.

A code will be sent to you. Enter that code and tap Next.

Note: After you’ve turned on two-factor authentication, you’ll be able to access backup codes for your account. If you don’t receive an SMS security code during the two-factor authentication login process, you’ll still be able to log into your account by using a backup code.

To turn two-factor authentication off:

Go to your profile and tap the cog (iOS) or the 3 dots (Android) in the top-right corner

Scroll down and tap Two-Factor Authentication

Tap the slider on Require Security Code to move to the off position

Then tap Turn Off at the bottom of the message that appears

Keep in mind that you must have a confirmed telephone number for your Instagram account to use two-factor authentication. When you enter a telephone number to turn on two-factor authentication it will become the confirmed number for your account.

What is a backup code?

My Mac Terminal Has Been Hacked Instagram Hacked

When two-factor authentication is on, every time you log into Instagram from an unknown device you’ll be asked to enter a backup code or a SMS code in addition to your username and password.

If an SMS security code can’t be sent due to connectivity or SMS delivery issues, you’ll still be able to complete the two-step authentication process with a backup code.

Click here to find out more about backup codes:https://help.instagram.com/1006568999411025

Here at CYBER123 we believe that prevention and training is the best way to secure your digital world. If we can train you on what things to spot, how scams and cybercrime works then we believe you are less likely to become a victim. Our unique training offers scenarios and advice on what to spot how to protect yourself and how to deal with the scams and frauds that are about in the world today.

Understanding the resources that support critical functions and the related cyber security risks enable businesses to define resources and efforts in mitigating the risks

CALL US: +44 (0)20 3457 4683EMAIL US: info@cyber123.com

IT ONLY TOOK 5 MINUTES TO GET YOUR DATA

If I have your work email address, generally, now I will have your first name and surname and the company you work for.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED

Firstly, if your Instagram account has been hacked then there is a good chance your email has been hacked as well. What you would need to do first would be to report it to Instagram.

TELEPHONE SPOOFING

Telephone spoofing is easy to do, all you have to do is create an account on a website, enter a few telephone numbers and you get to call someone as if you were someone else.

Is your child being Cyber Bullied

Parents can find it difficult to tell the difference between the emotional development of their children or whether something more sinister is taking place.
A lot of the times it is normal for growing children to have mood swings, quiet periods, manic periods and changes of emotional circumstance but sometimes these can also be a sign that they are being bullied or bullying others.

From Xero to Zero

To test and check the security of Xero online accounting software I wanted to see if they were susceptible to MITM attacks. I created a trial account and signed up and logged into Xero using standard 1FA (1 Factor Authentication –ie, password). I installed the Xero APP on my phone and Logged in being able to Skip MFA (Multiple Factor Authentication).

Three Mobile Data Breach

According to news reports some 6 million customer records have been stolen from Three Mobile (one of the UK’s largest mobile network providers). In order to commit this type of upgrade fraud the attackers must have used authorised login credentials to access the upgrades systems. Data accessed would have included names, phone numbers, addresses and date of births of customers.

Three reasons to worry about worms

Worms are a type of malware similar to viruses in that it is self-replicating. However, worms don’t generally attach themselves to applications. Why should you worry about worms?

The Day the Internet Died

Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PSN and a whole load of other internet services and websites were down or left partially working on Friday. This happened when hackers launched an extremely large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Dyn DNS Servers. Dyn is a major host of internet DNS servers. It looks like Dyn was hit with up to 4 attacks lasting most of Friday.

3 reasons to worry about spyware

Obviously spyware is not something that you would like to have on your computer, tablet or mobile phone but should you be worried about spyware? Some of the stories I have heard are just scary!

Are you infecting your customers?

Earlier in the year mobile provide O2 had marketing campaign where they were promoting an e-book. To distribute their e-book they sent out free USB memory sticks to their customers. Unfortunately for them the e-book wasn’t the only thing on the USB sticks and unwitting customers that plugged the USB sticks into a windows devices found themselves infect with a virus.

Bad customer support can be infuriating. And, with Instagram, there really appears to be no customer service at all–at least from human beings. Just bots that answer your message. Here’s the ridiculous saga of how my Instagram account got hacked and I received no reasonable support at all from Instagram.

Russian Hackers

Like many people, my Instagram account is the documentation of my life. While I use Facebook to post ordinary, every day things, Instagram is reserved only for my best photography and the most important events of my life. It’s my digital scrapbook of my life. I thought I would have it for the rest of my life.

So, imagine my frustration, when on the evening of August 3, 2018, I noticed that I couldn’t log in to my account as normal. My immediate reaction was that I made some kind of mistake when I had recently linked my Facebook account to my Instagram account. Yeah, that must be the problem.

As I was working on that, I received an email from Facebook (not Instagram) since, of course, Facebook owns Instagram. It appeared as though my account had been hijacked by a Russian email address. No problem I thought. I had two level authentication hooked up and all I had to do was click on the link from the suspicious email address and everything would go back to normal.

Email Change Notification From Instagram

Hi ballparkbob,

The email on your Instagram account was changed from <email removed> at 21:34 (PDT) on Friday, August 03 2018.

Is My Mac Hacked

Your new email is nasunowgerasim@mail.ru. If you didn’t change your email address, revert this change.

—

Not so easy. When I clicked on the “revert this change” link, it took me to a broken page.

Here’s the next email that I got from Instagram. Apparently, Instagram is now happy, because I fixed my own problem!

Instagram’s BOT Emails Think I Fixed My Problem

Hi,

Thanks for contacting us. We’ve looked into your report and it appears your issue has been resolved. If you’re still having trouble accessing your account, please reply to this email or visit the Help Center:

Thanks,

The Instagram Team

—

Oh goodie. Another link to your Help page at Instagram! I’ve only been there a few hundred times and it really should be called an (Un)Help(ful) page.

How is this happening? Did the hacker get into my email account also? Did the hacker have some other way to hack Instagram’s security process? Or, did the link from Instagram not work in the first place? I’ll never really know, because this was just the start of a month-long ordeal in dealing with Instagram and its horrendous customer service.

Why Me?

That’s the question that all ordinary people think when they get hacked. I get why you would want to hack a celebrity or politician with millions of followers, but why me? I’ve never had anything against Russians. I actually like vodka. Did I criticize Trump too much? What could the hackers possibly think they could get out of me?

But, good news would soon come my way. My daughter contacted me and said I must have been hacked. She had found my account and “ballparkbob” was now “maverilkira.” The good news was that the account was intact, except that the profile picture was changed from me to some medieval looking version of Maverilkira. All of my 777 images were there and all of my 801 followers were also still there. Moreover, I had not received any reports that my followers were receiving pornographic images or Viagra sales solicitations. All I needed to do was notify Instagram to return my account to its rightful owner and all would be great again.

The Hacker Who Stole My Instagram Account

—–

So, there was my account. You could still see my pictures on the account. Nothing seemed changed at all. I just couldn’t access it. Whew! No problem. After all, I own a mobile-first digital advertising agency called Purplegator and we spend a lot of money with Facebook and Instagram. I have a leg up on the others that reportedly had been hacked. I’ll just contact my VIP Facebook rep and he’ll be able to get my account back no problem.

My Facebook VIP rep was very helpful and kept me informed of his progress almost daily. I was in good hands I figured. Until 14 days later on August 17 when I received this message from my Facebook VIP rep!

My Facebook VIP Rep to the Rescue (Not)

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your patience! My specialists have let me know they do not support these types of issues. You will need to follow this channel: https://help.instagram.com/149494825257596?helpref=uf_permalink.

If you have any other questions or concerns in regards to this, please shoot me a message!

You may receive our survey and we ask that you please help us improve by taking a few seconds to tell us about your experience chatting with me. Thank you for contacting Facebook Ad Support. Have yourself a wonderful day Bob!

<Name Removed>
Facebook, Global Marketing Solutions

—–

Well, isn’t that nice? After 10 business days, all my Facebook VIP rep can do is send me a link to the Instagram help page. This is just great. The same help page that tells me to log in to my account before sending any message to Instagram help! I can’t log in to my account! I’ve been hacked!

I guess I’m on my own here. Not even my Facebook VIP rep is willing/able to help me! #Uggabugga

BOT Email Replies, Links that are Broken, Unhelpful Log In Suggestions

Instagram used to have a customer support phone number and email, but these are not supported any more. I guess Instagram and its billion users have made it untenable to worry about a single user who was hacked, even if that user is the president of an agency that spends half a million dollars per year with it.

At this point, I began trying numerous ways to get my account back from maverilkira. I spent countless hours reading what other people were doing on Reddit, Twitter ,and through other online resources. In the end, I could not get any responses from Instagram that were helpful to me.

I even reached out to two people that I know personally that worked at Instagram. Both tried, but basically all they could do was fill out the same forms that I was filling out on the app and online. I didn’t stop there, I began hitting up LinkedIn and the Instagram employees that are from my hometown or who attended my colleges to see if they could help me. All were very nice, but couldn’t do anything to help me. They actually seemed surprised that they couldn’t help me and also seemed surprised that hacking was even a problem on Instagram!

My retweeting all of the #InstagramHacked Tweets didn’t seem to get any responses either. The @Instagram Twitter account was useless and didn’t respond to anybody. I even tried Tweeting and friending Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Surely they would escalate this problem if they became aware. I even tried signing a petition from all of my fellow hackees to force Instagram to do something. Nothing was done. I guess when you have a billion users, you need not worry about single user problems, even if it was your fault to allow your service to get hacked.

On five occasions, through the normal Instagram email BOT system, I got to the point where I was asked to send in a photo of myself holding a sign that included a number and my picture. Instagram would then match it to images on the hacked account and give me back my access to my account. At last, this must be a job done by a human and not a BOT. I could explain my situation and they’d listen.

The first four times I sent in the picture, I received an email back asking me to be sure to send the image from my account on the app and not another account! Ugh! I can’t log in to my account! I responded to the emails to let them know this, but then either the email BOT conversation stopped or I got the dreaded “It looks like you fixed your problem” email back. My detailed email showed images and details down to the minute of what I had been doing over the past four weeks to try to get the account back from the hacker. Two minutes after my message (not nearly enough time to actually read my message), I received a reply from Instagram. I did this several times and each time I responded to the email, I received the same email back from Instagram. Each response I sent got a bit testier until I finally just responded with “You Suck.” Yep, same email reply.

Instagram Phone Number Been Hacked

I did get some detailed instructions from a Twitter user who was able to recover their hacked account so I tried a fifth time to send in my picture. I used almost the exact same wording as the person who successfully recovered the account. Surely, the fifth time would be the charm?

No such luck. After filling out the form for a fifth time and receiving a message back that I would be able to recover my account, the link led me to a link that allowed me to get my new placeholder account on ballparkbob back, not the hacker account that stole my identity. Thanks Instagram. Thanks for actually reading the lengthy document that I sent.

The End of BallparkBob (by Maverilkira)

On Sunday, September 2, 2018, exactly a month after the hacking, I noticed that the hacker account of “maverilkira” had removed my images, although it still shows “777 posts” at the top of the account. According to information I’ve read online, the account has been deleted and no recovery of the images is possible.

My Account is Deleted

I have reached out to everybody I know at Instagram to try to find out if I should give up at this point, but have received no response. This is odd, because they were previously responsive — at least the humans. I suspect they simply don’t know. If I was Sofia Vergara, maybe they’d be able to replace the hacked account with all of the images intact, but I doubt I have the same level of influence.

Instagram Affirms My Hacked Account is Dead

Sometimes you just don’t want to admit it, but Instagram finally affirmed with me that my account (the hacker account “maverilkira”) was dead when they sent this email to me.

Hi,

The account you’re referring to has been removed. We’re unable to restore accounts that have been permanently deleted. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Thanks,

The Instagram Team

—

Russian Collusion

As a last ditch effort, I even tried colluding with the Russians. I sent an email to the hacker and asked him/her how much they wanted to return my account intact. I am still awaiting a response. Maybe they are working on the midterm elections now instead.

The Sad State of My Current Instagram Account

One thing you will want to do when your account is hacked is to go back in and reserve your old username. Only then, can you be sure that somebody else (or the hacker) won’t grab your same username. This was advice I received online. So, I do have my username back, but I’ve lost all the images and nearly all of my followers. The lone post I have up is a memorial to my account — a screenshot of my beloved maverilkira. Maybe one day, I’ll jump back on the Instagram bandwagon, but at this point, I’m simply too angry to become an Instagram super-user again.

Instagram Account Has Been Hacked

Hey Instagram, Can You Help Me? PLEASE.

I’m not sure that it is entirely true that Instagram can’t restore my account to its original state. If a hacker removed Sofia Vergara’s account, I suspect it would find its way back to its original state. So, I’m still holding out hope. It’s likely the same level of hope of the Baltimore Orioles winning the ’19 World Series, but it’s hope nonetheless.

In a way, I guess this is my final effort in writing this article about my pain in working with Instagram’s lack of customer service. Perhaps some sympathetic human who works at Instagram will read this article and reach out to help me and find a way to restore my account, its 777 image posts, and its 800+ followers.

My Instagram Account Got Hacked

But, I’m not holding my breath.

My Mac Terminal Has Been Hacked Instagram Accounts

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My Instagram Account Was Hacked

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