Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/meta-confirms-thousands-of-instagram-accounts-were-hacked-by-abusing-its-ai-chatbot/

by speckx • 2 months ago

709 265 2 months ago

this.weekinsecurity.com

toomuchtodo• 2 months ago

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-...

https://www.maine.gov/agviewer/content/ag/985235c7-cb95-4be2...

sva_• 2 months ago

Date(s) Breach Occured: 04/17/2026
Date Breach Discovered: 05-31-2026

mcintyre1994• 2 months ago

I’m guessing they have no functional human support for the people who had their accounts stolen. I get the impression Meta didn’t know this was happening until they were contacted by the media.

Cyan488• 2 months ago

"The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account," said Meta in its breach notice.

I'm not sure "worked properly" and "as intended" accurately describe this situation.

ludwik2• 2 months ago

I like to dunk on Meta as much as the next guy, but I think this makes sense: deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job. The tools it has access to should enforce the permissions layer, ensuring that the LLM can never perform actions the user themselves should not be allowed to perform. In this case, the tool failed to do that.

TZubiri8• 2 months ago

deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job.

But when humans handled it, this was not as much as a problem. That is, the humans did the job, because they recognized the need to do that job.

Sure sometimes accounts could get recovered if a human was tricked, but evidently it was easier to trick the LLM in masse than humans.

gavmor• 2 months ago

The overall system that allowed this implementation is accountable. So why put such a fine point on it so as to exculpate the LLM?

dbbk3• 2 months ago

Yes the LLM part is irrelevant here. It'd be just the same if it was a HTML form.

ofjcihen• 2 months ago

Maybe they’re communicating exactly what it sounds like and are just owning up to being complete morons?

RobRivera• 2 months ago

Oh it was a downstream dependency. The tool worked, it was the downstream dependency. Glory to Arstotszka

moffkalast• 2 months ago

Tool so great, downstream dependency not required! Right?

Cpoll2• 2 months ago

The argument here is that the AI is a glorified input page. The input field asks for your username and email and sends it to a backend function. Such an input page is working as intended.

The problem is when the backend function doesn't verify that the email matches the username.

jgalt212• 2 months ago

Fair enough. Never trust client-submitted browser form, but always trust LLM-submitted form.

dgoldstein0• 2 months ago

Why on earth would the backend function even take an email?

Or perhaps said different: use the submitted info to identify the account; send any sensitive messages (recovery codes, password resets whatever) to only the contact info on file. If the chat bot can send such email it should do so via an API that sends only to contact info on file for the associated account and not to an email that's provided by the bot.

lou13062• 2 months ago

If the backend function was so poorly coded to allow such a gargantuan security hole, then it is an even worse problem. Basically Meta is throwing its own engineers under the bus so that its AI chatbot can save face. Scary stuff.

Unless the backend was _also_ vibe-coded, in which case it is still an AI problem.

oenton2• 2 months ago

Okay, I hear you. I do. From a technical viewpoint, that may very well be how their systems are implemented. But this still doesn't answer the question of why the fuck this matters to these states' AGs and the people they represent.

nico• 2 months ago

That sounds a lot like the justifications Claude and ChatGPT give when confronted about something they did wrong, or when asked to provide a customer support response about software issues

dmoose• 2 months ago

I've lost track of the number of times Claude has basically said "it was like that when i got here" in the face of a clearly bogus choice and easily disproved explanation.

totetsu• 2 months ago

Then ‘ The tool itself’ was not appropriate to the job in the first place

laweijfmvo• 2 months ago

so how long was the bug there? was there a way to access it before/without the support agent? it feels like Meta will throw anything under the bus to redirect blame from the AI, because that would be the end of their $600B (depending on “which number you want to go with”) experiment

nkrisc• 2 months ago

The tool worked correctly and as intended, but due to a bug it did not work correctly nor as intended.

thih9• 2 months ago

To be fair, that quote in the original article could have more context. By "The tool" they meant "AI-assisted support tool"[1]; perhaps they meant that the issue was not an AI hallucination inherent of the tool, but a fixable bug.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-...

theptip2• 2 months ago

Sounds like they are saying the agent did not malfunction, and this vuln could have been triggered by a human support agent too.

TZubiri8• 2 months ago

I get the joke, but it's a relevant nuance that the new code, the chatbot, did not have 'the bug'. I still think that the mistake and head that should roll should be the one that published the chatbot.

But it's important to acknowledge that there was a 'bug' in an underlying tool and not in the chatbot, and still PIP/fire those responsible for publishing the chatbot and exposed an otherwise internal tool to the public, and not those that introduced the 'bug' to an internal tool.

tomkarho• 2 months ago

How very Wernher von Braun of them.

TZubiri8• 2 months ago

Of course.

What I gather is that this internal tool was used by human support agents, and it was their responsibility to verify the email adresses and general validity of a claim.

But when implementing AGI TM that was overseen, maybe the oversight in the separate code path was a 'bug', but the mistake was making the chatbot obviously, if the separate code path had a bug, then it had become ossified into a feature, and it was internal, not exposed to the public.

This is an external communication, to save face sure, but if this is the internal excuse, it would be absolutely the wrong RCA and it reads as if the one who made the mistake is not admitting they made their mistake. Which to be honest, just making the mistake is enough to get fired, but not admitting it is enough to get ultra fired.

vb-84483• 2 months ago

In italian we say "l'operazione è riuscita perfettamente, ma il paziente è morto" -> "the surgery was a complete success, but the patient died"

embedding-shape• 2 months ago

Both this and what Meta said reminds me of "Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

I also can't believe the people who were involved with writing this response from Meta, didn't realize how obviously bad it sounds. It's like there is no humans working and writing there anymore.

raffael_de• 2 months ago

"operation successful, patient dead."

unmole• 2 months ago

"Operation succesful, patient dead" is a common saying in India.

methyl• 2 months ago

Maybe it was euthanasia?

redbell• 2 months ago

Haha.. This reminds me of a classic Windows MessageBox meme that goes: "Operation failed successfully!"

panzi• 2 months ago

We have the same saying in German: Operation erfolgreich, Patient tot.

saltyoldman• 2 months ago

Isn't that exactly what they said when Cambridge Analytics data gathering happened?

cynicalsecurity• 2 months ago

This-is-fine.jpg

ChuckMcM6• 2 months ago

Read that as "worked as written" and "we disclaim any consequential or incidental damages and do not warrant this software."

I continue to believe we could fix a lot of things in the US if we updated the UCC[1] to disallow 'disclaiming liability on software used in a product.'

[1] Universal Commercial Code -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc

jjmarr2• 2 months ago

I've always wanted to expose myself to unlimited legal liability by distributing open source software.

teaearlgraycold2• 2 months ago

The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended

The author of the post is close to the author of the AI code on the org chart

however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify

The author of the post is far from the author of this "code path" on the org chart

dboreham• 2 months ago

There should have been a test case for this. There wasn't because most shops don't actually test their product. They do some test theater such as unit testing.

stephenhuey• 2 months ago

What was that mantra? Something about broken software is what they aim for?

az226• 2 months ago

I'm sure. It was not working properly nor as intended.

tyleo• 2 months ago

Error: Success!

dylan6044• 2 months ago

You must work in QA

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

Our autonomous client-assistance system is managed by a teenager that usually makes good decisions but sometimes makes bad decisions and so all the teenager’s decisions are checked by a minder before being implemented. Unfortunately the minder wasn’t paying attention, so, here we are. However, our teenager is a great kid and did nothing wrong! It’s all the minder’s fault.

P.S. Would you like to have our teenager manage your system too? Terms are reasonable! Of course you accept all liability, so better get a good minder - and no, don’t use an AI as the minder, that just introduces a new failure mode.

hsbauauvhabzb• 2 months ago

‘Hey Claude, write me a PR statement’

warmedcookie• 2 months ago

Having had my 2FA Facebook account banned 3 years ago because a bot signed up under my email for Instagram (which I did not have), I can confidently say the email verification issue has been a problem for a long time at Meta.

xyst• 2 months ago

It’s a public release prepped/reviewed by the in house legal counsel.

Don’t read too much into it. Facebook wants to face as little accountability and keep the future class action lawsuit to a minimum.

trumpdong6• 2 months ago

They're saying: our AI worked perfectly, we just prompted it wrong.

As you do. All AI failures are caused by bad prompting because AIs are perfect.

Schlagbohrer• 2 months ago

No no the tool worked fine, it was the system that failed. They blame society, basically.

endofreach• 2 months ago

Unfortunately this statement will, in spite of what you identified correctly, likely do its job and divert attention from the fundamental issues we are facing with a technology that has already spread further than anyone can control. From enterprise too lay man. The whole world of computing was not built ever expecting software capabilities like this to ever exist.

I am not saying it's like a nuclear bomb. Rather like the first guns brought into fights the others were perfectly prepared for ti fight with swords and didn't even know yet, about this fascinating invention called a gun. Sounds interesting. Let me inspect it. Oh wow, that's interesting technology. What happens if i push that thing back? Will it re... oops...

Thank god that we have honourable people like altman, zuckerberg, musk. Imagine how bad all this would turn within the next few years, if major decisions were made by self-serving, delusional, greedy egomaniacs...

Of course currently let's first hope those wars and all the tension in societies all over the world, in war or peace, won't explode into something really, really bad. Looking at history, i fear we see how social tension on large scale over time... not saying it's not obvious to almost everyone. So well, let's just keep hoping. Maybe throwing blackbox AI tech into the mix, would surprise and change course of history. Actually, while i am thinking about it, i think i just changed my opinion into the opposite position, lol. Honestly, if it's 50/50 that this will lead to the worst possible outcome intensified, it's still better than just checking boxes following the "humans slowly stumbling into near-extinction experiences 101" handbook. Because just according to that, we're lucky if we're off by 10 years. There must be a big change in humanity and how the world is currently constructed, for all this leading to anything other than what we should expect from history. If we kept all nations busy with huge technological issues, that made all of their personal lifes so complicated, turn every elitists luxury into a burden, busy to defend what they own, while they can't realize, that normal life has changed so much, they now are the ones, frozen in life. They would have no time for conflict.

This sounds totally logical. In any other scenario, it would be pretty insane what we are all doing and entertaining (including me, top10 hypocrite).

I fear it's too late to turn ship, yet we still can jump ship.

---

Especially because now thinking about the thoughts that just went through my head, maybe (technological) disruptions are actually disrupting. But not a status quo of an economic model.

But a pretty clear loop of human nature and "humans in societies". And the more often we disrupt this loop, the more time we get before it's ready to start over again.

And now we have something that has the potential to change all fundamentals so much, that all the major conditions inside this loops iteration become meaningless. The environment changes so much, the state of the checkboxes gets emptied. Cache invalidated. Indices are gone.

Oh, i know how dumb this sounds. I am not even trying to claim anything. I didn't even think about it before, this is just a note of the words that i typed, almost on autopilot. No idea if i believe a part of this could be real. But even thought, just as a mere fictional story, it already entertained me.

ncr100• 2 months ago

"Marge, there's the truth..." (frowns and shakes head negatively) "...and there's THE TRUTH!" (smiles brightly and nods enthusiastically)

-Lionel Hutz, Simpsons, Season 9 - "Realty Bites"

loloquwowndueo• 2 months ago

This was on hacker news a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102) - description of the “hack”, not the cockamamie confirmation by Meta.

jamwise• 2 months ago

This is wild. How did anyone approve this architecture. You should never give your LLM privileged access the current user doesn't have access to. Even if you're not logged in the LLM's tool calls should only be able to access the same flow you would, as in: be able to send a password reset email to your own email! This is like if you had a password reset page for your profile and had a email field you could fill in to have it sent to any email LOL.

rvz• 2 months ago

If this was a bank that had zero humans and the AI chatbot was abused to hand over sensitive information about their customers which led to this disaster, people would never trust their bank ever again and leave.

Meta believes that they can vibe-code their reputation down the drain by removing humans in the loop.

Applying a technical solution to a social problem almost always ends in disasters like this.

Reputation can’t be vibe-coded.

CivBase• 2 months ago

Meta's brand is already toxic. Idk if there's much to lose there.

groundzeros2015• 2 months ago

Buying more. The vibe here is getting close to 2021

cyanydeez2• 2 months ago

"abusing" by using it's built in insecurity to do insecure things.

It's like, people abusing an open door. "Guys, just because we left the door open to your bedroom doesn't mean we're responsible".

God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit.

lazide• 2 months ago

It won’t be.

also this is more like them leaving the keys in the door, then someone comes along, uses the keys, and steals all your stuff.

truthfully, no equipment is actually defective in this scenario eh?

topaz0• 2 months ago

If we're nitpicking metaphors I think it's more accurate to say it's like they were taking requests to rekey the lock on your door.

teaearlgraycold2• 2 months ago

God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit.

You realize this is the company that enabled a genocide and got away with it? Not to mention accelerating teenager suicides with full knowledge.

cyanydeez2• 2 months ago

why epse would i invoke a mythical diety

phyzome• 2 months ago

Corrected headline: "Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked due to their insecure AI chatbot".

jhhh• 2 months ago

Why was 'can a user request a different email' not literally the first test that comes to mind when making something like this? Do they not test anything because the scale is too big?

joshuat• 2 months ago

In their defense, they asked the LLM to make no mistakes

SXX• 2 months ago

And it did no mistakes. System worked exactly as LLM intended.

TZubiri8• 2 months ago

Because software professionals are conflating simplicity of user experience with simplicity of dev experience.

During development they were likely not thinking of the user experience, nor even the support agent experience, but on their development experience, they asked the LLM to develop the chatbot, and it worked, and the speed was documented and reported upstream so that shareholders invest, if there is any forethought it would go against the narrative of AI becoming the engineer or 100xing productivity.

gdulli• 2 months ago

The nature of the invention is for people to relieve themselves of the burden of having to use their minds. And while there will be exceptions, (including, I'm sure you: the person reading this comment,) the vast majority of people are hungry to use AI in that spirit of being able to be lazy.

quantummagic• 2 months ago

Lazy can be a good thing. Since time and attention are finite and not fungible, it allows you to do something else. There's a reason we're all too lazy to do long arithmetic with pen and paper, instead relieving the burden of using our minds by outsourcing to spreadsheets and calculators. Not only does it allow us to think at a higher level of abstraction, but it also means we can take our kids to the park more often.

GoToRO• 2 months ago

Unforseen side effect: I used AI to write so much code that now I struggle to have a good mental map of it, so I became lazy without having an intention to do so. Fun times!

webbdev2• 2 months ago

Meanwhile an account I created for a new product was permanently disabled by an automated system with no path for me to appeal to a human.

(If anyone at Meta/Instagram sees this I wrote a brief blog post with the details. Please help! https://addisonwebb.com/blog/2026-06-05-Can%20Someone%20at%2... )

TZubiri8• 2 months ago

Did you create the account separately? Or as an asset of your main Meta account (like Meta Business Suite)?

I'm creating the accounts in Meta Business Suite, so I would have a recourse with my main personal account which can be linked to some adspend, so I'm assuming it will have better support channels than accounts created through an end-user interface.

webbdev2• 2 months ago

This was probably my mistake. This is the first time I've ever done this so I just set up an account like a regular user. I didn't figure out how to link it with my Meta Business Suite until it was too late.

adamddev1• 2 months ago

There's an excellent little book in German called "KI und der Neue Faschismus" [1] (AI and the New Fascism) where the author (Rainer Mühlhoff) tries to warn about the dangers of decisions based on opaque statistical models (like LLMs) instead of a clear, human auditable decision process.

[1] https://rainermuehlhoff.de/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam...

sebastiennight3• 2 months ago

Isn't there an EU law that allows any EU citizen the right to transparency and/or appeal as to automated decisions made about them?

basisword2• 2 months ago

They're awful with this. Any time I try to create an account to use for business purposes I'm asked for id within minutes and then they still ban the account. You need to fun everything through your personal account.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Any time I try to create an account to use for business purposes I'm asked for id within minutes and then they still ban the account.

That's because they require accounts to represent an individual. They're pretty clear that it can't be for a business or a non-human entity. You can set up a professional account from your personal account, but the account has to be for a person.

jjcm• 2 months ago

This is extremely common, unfortunately, to a point where it's a known/expected outcome when you're first creating a brand or product page among those in the biz.

If this doesn't work, I'd encourage you to reach out to a brand/ad agency and pay them $100 to ask their meta contact to help you get unblocked. You pretty much have to know someone who knows someone at meta in order to create these.

Tip: Do not post about this on twitter or other platforms - you'll get a ton of automated spam.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

If this doesn't work, I'd encourage you to reach out to a brand/ad agency and pay them $100 to ask their meta contact to help you get unblocked.

I would not recommend paying anybody anything for this. The problem was that they tried to create an account for a non-human entity, which is against the rules. You have to have a primary account set up for a person, not a business.

prox• 2 months ago

Or just leave the pile of crap behind. The more we do, the less the whole system matters. Never been happier since I left last year.

And yes I can already hear the reply the “we need it for…” , sure as a company if you feel you need it. As an individual however, it’s time for the next thing. TikTok, Instagram and Twitter are old and worn and not it. Yesterday’s news. Social media couldn’t be less social if they tried.

qingcharles2• 2 months ago

Lots of Meta contacts on swapd.com who will take your money and unlock your account. Poster is already at the permanently banned stage, though, which means it's not a simple ticket for a Meta employee, which is normally the $500-1000 range. It's gonna be a $2000+ job.

Can also try here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaLawsuits/

brikym• 2 months ago

I had a similar with Google. I couldn't verify my site for ads and there was no route to get a competent human. But it was fine when an agency did it for me. The problem is that agency take a 20% cut.

Cider9986• 2 months ago

Try using an anti-detect browser. They're built for making new accounts among other things.

spike021• 2 months ago

I tried creating an entirely separate account for a meetup group and had the same problem. Nothing I tried worked.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Meanwhile an account I created for a new product

Meta requires the main account to be created for a person, not a product, business, or non-human entity. That's why you got hit with the "Please confirm you are a human" confirmation and then the account was locked for violating community standards, which require primary accounts to be people.

The community standards page in the links they sent you are pretty dense and it's easy to think you're not violating anything if you're not posting adult content and the other obvious categories. This is the section you violated:

Create an account that represents a non-human entity, such as a business, pet, or fictional character

You have to follow the steps to set up a business page from your personal account. Sorry you didn't know this before going through the process, but it's important to read the proper channels for setting up business pages on all of the social media platforms these days. They're all dealing with an onslaught of spam and scam pages and they're under a lot of pressure to keep them out.

onemoresoop• 2 months ago

I’m sorry, but this should have been made clear in the registration process by Meta and not have entered this dead path at all. Tell me it looks like bad engineering and that together with poor customer support is a reputational damage in the long-term. Not that they have good reputation but it’ll only get worse

quadrifoliate• 2 months ago

Sorry you didn't know this before going through the process, but it's important to read the proper channels for setting up business pages on all of the social media platforms these days.

This is exactly why Meta and other large companies need to be regulated with anti-trust regulations really soon. This whole "whoops sorry you didn't know, but it's a private company" thing only works if there are 5-6 other competitors you can go to that will take your business.

Meta is a de facto monopoly for a lot of small businesses; and should either be broken up or be subject to a ton of utility-style regulation.

blitzar• 2 months ago

Standard path is to have sex with a few employees at meta to get it unlocked.

https://popcrush.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-inst...

Havoc2• 2 months ago

AI-assisted account recovery system

oh no...Meta what are you doing

rf15• 2 months ago

That sweet koolaid taste, how could one resist?

...They really ahouldn't have, and I wonder how this will affect all the big AI IPOs. After all, Meta is one of the big players in the space. Surely if they can't do it right, then...

acdha• 2 months ago

That’s the part I keep thinking about with this story: they have spent over $200 billion dollars on AI and achieved this.

mschuster91• 2 months ago

Account recovery is by far the #1 kind of ticket any service will get. Either because people forget their credentials, lose their credentials, get hacked or get impersonated - and that's just the legitimate tickets, on top of that come illegitimate tickets from everyday script kiddies over ransom extortioners (i.e. the people that aim to steal "valuable" handles) to nation-state actors that, say, want to get access to DMs of people messaging oppositional accounts.

That in turn means three things... it costs a lot of money to have humans look at these tickets, the PR damage from both acting and not acting on such requests can be immense, and users/customers can be anything from the smartest and richest people on the world down to the kind of utter imbeciles whose brains get surpassed by bears [1] or who plainly are not able to write. To make it worse, often enough online services don't have any kind of tie back to some known government-issued ID (either directly or by a proxy such as a mobile phone SIM), there's corruption involved on all levels, and for particularly "juicy" targets the stakes, if they can be converted to a monetary amount at all, can reach into the millions of dollars.

Now, Instagram alone has 3 billion (!) users from across the world, so they are bound to not just having to spend a lot of money on user support (remember, we are talking about the entire world, they also need to deal with about 7.000 (!) actively spoken languages, and having attack targets that are as powerful as US Presidents or as rich as Elon Musk. Clearly, the risk management involved in the entire idea was horribly deficient, but let's not act like this is a trivial problem domain in the first place. And hence the push for AI, simply because it - if done correctly - can take a lot of work off of the first-level support desks for a fraction of the money.

[1] https://velvetshark.com/til/til-smartest-bears-dumbest-touri...

[2] https://www.sapiens.org/language/world-languages-counting-me...

dakolli3• 2 months ago

You don't need an llm or a human to handle 99% of account recovery tickets. They're just shoving LLMs into everything because decision makers have llm psychosis because openclaw modified their calendar a few times and now think they live in star trek.

anematode• 2 months ago

A difficult problem domain, yes... so where was the staged rollout? The penetration testing? Why did it take so long to disable the bot after reports of the exploit surfaced? etc.

Havoc2• 2 months ago

I get automating most of the interaction but giving the LLM rights to actually grant strangers access to accounts is insane

_RPM• 2 months ago

Probably some product manager pushed back on security considerations raised by engineers.

whirlwin2• 2 months ago

I got a suspicious password reset request email today from Meta but it landed in my inbox. Luckily I have MFA and after checking audit logs inside IG upon logging in, I did not see anything suspicious.

notrealyme123• 2 months ago

2FA did not help according to the primary finding

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102

whirlwin2• 2 months ago

In that case it sounds like the last waves of malicious reset attempts happened after the patch was put in place

zahirbmirza• 2 months ago

And who said cameras linked to Meta in their glasses were a good idea?

dwa3592• 2 months ago

I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.

herpdyderp• 2 months ago

Realistically, how will this affect Meta at all? Some people are pissed, nobody else cares, business as usual.

jeffbee4• 2 months ago

Well, these hacks targeted large influencer accounts. It could have more severe impact than 20k randomly selected accounts.

dakolli3• 2 months ago

What are their alternatives? I'm assuming that most of the 22k people with large audiences that need a large platform to reach them. Meta unfortunately, is the only platform that allows people to reach across many demographics. Its the people that follow the 22k accounts that are important, and they are unaffected by this and thus aren't leaving meta (and 99% won't even know this happened or care).

asveikau• 2 months ago

Depends on the use case, but TikTok is an alternative for many of them, I would say it generally feels more like the place where interesting things are happening vs. meta properties.

jeffbee4• 2 months ago

Somehow this company still earns over a billion dollars a week in net profits, which I find puzzling.

dylan6044• 2 months ago

Why? They clearly are not spending money on employee salaries, taxes, or benefits.

pluc2• 2 months ago

By "abusing" they mean "using"

globular-toast• 2 months ago

No, it's still abuse. Just like it's still stealing even if I left my front door unlocked.

pluc2• 2 months ago

It's not stealing if you give it to me, regardless of your door

sebastiennight3• 2 months ago

The appropriate metaphor would rather be your landlord deciding to renovate the entire back wall of your apartment/house to make it an open-air design.

People coming in from the street to hang out and rifle through your belongings would still be "abusing" the system according to the law, but it's hard to not consider the landlord somewhat responsible.

johnyzee• 2 months ago

"Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised. [...]

The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person's entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages, and account activity [...]

the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week [...]"

This is staggering.

Lionga2• 2 months ago

One can only hope EU gives them a GDPR fine very close to the limit of 4% of global turnover. But when EU is actually need to protect customer I think they will fail.

mvkel4• 2 months ago

Incidents like this show how unenforceable GDPR is, and how it's been a net negative for users since its inception. It's idealogical back-patting, toothless when it matters.

smrtinsert2• 2 months ago

This could avoid flagging by Meta explicitly allow bot traffic to do stuff with impunity on its services. Don't tell me an army of people went through and compromised acct by acct.

simpaticoder2• 2 months ago

No fan of Meta, but I think "staggering" is properly determined by the percent of users affected rather than the absolute number. It's staggering to an SMB with 100k customers; it's bad, but not "staggering" to an internet juggernaught with 3B MAU.

Gigachad3• 2 months ago

Twenty _thousand_ people had their personal data stolen, many of them relied on these accounts to run their business, many put at risk of hackers impersonating them.

Meta in a fair world should be forced to financially compensate these people. They built a world where many people basically have to use their products for their jobs and then failed to look after the data because they wanted to replace customer support with a vibe coded AI tool.

madeofpalk• 2 months ago

No. Percentages allow them to hide in the law of averages. Go tell those twenty thousand people that it's banal that Meta fucked up like this.

sandcat_• 2 months ago

Worth noting that Meta has a track record of revising breach numbers upwards. We may find out it’s a lot higher than this in the coming weeks.

gaiagraphia• 2 months ago

Why does scale absolve you of crime?

If you or me hacked 20,000 people and potentially fucked over their lives, what'd be the consequences?

Who's going to attach their name to this negligent act and do time?

dansquizsoft• 2 months ago

You only have to look at both the ridiculiously terrible "Q&A chatbot" that is in FaceBook under some posts (do they still have this?) and the fact that their system can't tell the difference between an inappropriate and a non-inappropriate comment most of the time to understand just how far behind Meta is in AI...

Fairburn• 2 months ago

Are we winning yet?

paulpauper• 2 months ago

Imagine how much $ ppl could have made hijacking famous accounts to promote crypto or other crap. I wonder how often this happened.

empiree• 2 months ago

Yet another reminder that most of these chatbots get shipped way before they're ready. Loud marketing, security treated as an afterthought, all to ride the AI hype. LLMs open up a whole new attack surface and a lot of teams still treat prompt injection like a fun edge case. This is what happens when you ship the demo instead of the product.

alvis• 2 months ago

how on earth a password reset API would take both email address and account id as parameters? The chat bot is fine. I bet it's the API written by AI the issue

Lionga2• 2 months ago

Just AI Slop doing AI Slop things

tomashertus• 2 months ago

Move fast and break things.

smrtinsert2• 2 months ago

How do business owners hire people from Meta knowing these types of "bugs" get deployed with a shrug? Meta will survive them. Their business might not.

RgrTheShrubbr• 2 months ago

The AI passed the Turing Test by becoming the world's most trusting customer service rep.

hero4hire• 2 months ago

People were reporting their accounts were being taken over with proper 2fa. Everyone had wondered how they hackers could take over accounts with little information, people were saying "inside job."

This is exactly the stupid explanation I expected. Your privacy and security. Meta. Serious Business.

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages

god dang!! we are going to see some juicy stuff

dylan6044• 2 months ago

Will we, or will we read a bunch of crypto requests to not see that juicy stuff and a lot of people paying?

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

huh? im more interested in what kind of DMs famous people are sending to each other

thraway3837• 2 months ago

Has the data surfaced somewhere? A lot of IG accounts are private by choice, and this kind of data, if surfaced publicly, could have devastating privacy violations. People share all kinds of stuff on there, a lot of it not meant for public consumption. I'm not wanting a debate on "well you shouldn't put anything private on Facebook's servers or the internet blah blah blah". I'm just curious if the actual contents of the hack have been surfaced.

boppo1• 2 months ago

Is there a way to check if I was affected? Does Meta know who was affected?

the_black_hand• 2 months ago

I'll never understand using AI/bot for customer support. IG is a well know platform. If I have an issue I feel pressed to connect with a support agent about it very likely is something a bot would struggle with, otherwise I'd just google. I understand there some grandmas who can do a google search, but the vast majority of folks reaching out for support are doing so because they have a real issue that can't be simply automated.

Furthermore, having a bot handle a hacked account is support ticket is just insane. Why tf would you put a bot there and give it permission to take action?

madrasman• 2 months ago

Unlike programmers, most people don’t read long help articles or take multi-step actions. Bots can answer questions directly and take actions (or guide a user through step by step).

itsnkr2293• 2 months ago

Where is the security left now?

anonzzzies• 2 months ago

Is there a tl;dr? are these people getting their accounts back?

butler14• 2 months ago

Silicon Valley’s finest

hayaan259292• 2 months ago

Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

hayaan259292• 2 months ago

Just.me_samiyy hacked

latexr2• 2 months ago

Meta is clearly staying true to their ethos. “Move fast and break things”, “ask for forgiveness, not permission”, “have your security researcher delete their own email email by accident and then refuse to learn anything and use that same system to manage user accounts”.

naik11• 2 months ago

I want to hacke one instgram account

epsteingpt• 1 month ago

The crazy thing is the 20000 accounts won't just be randoms, but some of the top accounts.

malikusama00084• 1 month ago

gcuflc_confessions2023

malikusama00084• 1 month ago

Hack this account gcuflc_confessions2023

malikusama00084• 1 month ago

itskamran• 1 month ago

what best we can expect from Meta....the shameless founder and shameless policies and security....

jasonperez77• 1 month ago

No 2FA required for this to work. People who didn't turn it on got hosed. Meta should have just forced 2FA for everyone ages ago.

Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

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