parable

I've had a similar thought in the past. I was thinking about the feasibility of a law being introduced where each company making over a certain amount of money per year must begin a VDP (and optionally a BBP) so that security flaws can be reported to them easily. This can easily be done by simply opening up security@companydomain and using security.txt (https://securitytxt.org). Reports must receive a response in N days, where N is calculated based on available staff, resource allocation, and revenue of the company. If they don't receive a response after N days, this can be escalated to some government agency which can take action against the company for failing to respond to a report on time.

Companies can and do get away with arguing that they have a "lawful basis" to collect whatever data they'd like. It's unfortunate.

IANAL, but the law seems a bit vague to me, and it appears that companies use that vagueness to their advantage. Maybe I'm just not articulating my arguments correctly.

Otherwise, just assume everything you do online is public and act accordingly.

This is such a depressing reality. It's also what governments want you to believe. If you aren't able to speak your mind about anything anonymously, then you won't be able to, say, spread ideas that go against them.

Admitting defeat at all and not even trying to teach people about privacy results in the "I don't care, what's the point?" attitude that plagues many people today.

I use Snusbase (https://snusbase.com). They've been around since around 2016 and haven't had any issues legally - they're the longest-standing data breach search engine besides HIBP, as far as I know.

(This is not an advertisement.)

Hashes can be cracked, and end users won't understand how to create password hashes to check which one was leaked. Plus, salts exist.

Passwords shouldn't matter anyways. Use a password manager and be done with it. The real issue is metadata which can't easily be changed - phone numbers, addresses, and the like. If any of that data is leaked, it becomes much harder to contain impact. You can't move addresses every time your address gets leaked online.

I wish that were the case, but because of there being barely any consequences for breaches, it's much more profitable to store everything you can and sell it to the highest bidder. Make it a huge risk to store data, then companies will start treating data like a live hand grenade.

I'd also add a third issue to this list: data retention. Too many companies I've dealt with have privacy policies that state something to the tune of "we'll hold onto your data for as long as required" without giving much of an explanation as to how long "as required" is.

I find it very hard to trust any email service that claims to be E2EE without an audit by a reputable firm like Cure53 or Trail of Bits.

I signed up to give it a brief test and immediately noticed that emails are returned from the server in plain text. This means that the emails are decrypted on the server, which defeats the entire purpose of E2EE. The encrypted email contents and metadata should be returned to the user and decrypted on the client.

It's also painfully obvious that the entire thing is vibe-coded. While that in itself isn't an issue, it raises scrutiny. If the author doesn't have a full understanding of the code their LLM generates, some nasty bugs could be lurking.

Not very promising.

I'm not sure how I haven't heard of this yet. There have been too many times I've wished I could convert a command-line script to a native application easily for me not to try this.

Kudos for the public disclosure. Too many people haven't been happy with MSRC and it's starting to boil over (see the Nightmare Eclipse situation, too). Maybe all of these disclosures will cause them to do some introspection and realize they're the problem. I highly doubt that, but one can dream.

It seems pretty trivial to just add a check in the agent's tool call to determine if the email is actually the one on file (or one that has previously been on file). I'm not sure why it's taking them so long to remediate.

The bug still exists - two of my friends have lost access to their accounts as of an hour ago. They've partially recovered but are unable to change their passwords, so their accounts are still technically in the hands of the attacker(s).

It appears the exploit hasn't been patched: https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2061636614267273332

I've heard the new "method" has to do with setting your location to Singapore or something, but I have yet to confirm anything.

The original 2FA did not get thoroughly bypassed, because otherwise I would've lost my username, so that's false - at least, based on my experience.

However, there are separate vulnerabilities that allow for 2FA to be bypassed on Instagram. I assume they were chained to take over specific high-value accounts. The 2FA removal happens as a service - most people charge around $1,000+ - so it wasn't viable for most lower-value accounts. Anything that was worth over $1k probably had the bypass applied to it.

I suggest you try signing into your Instagram account via the app or website to check if you've been compromised. It could very well be a bot trying to obtain your recovery method hints but you could've also fallen victim to this exploit, especially if you have a short or valuable username.

If there's no recovery email address set, or that email has expired, there are no recovery methods to verify with. The account is locked "for good". I use quotes because in some cases I've been able to recover Gmail accounts with similar characteristics by simply trying often on my home IP address using Google Chrome.

This still happens. Meta doesn't do much to protect against this, they just fire more people and hire new agents when they find out one was bribed.

It's against Meta's terms to buy and sell accounts, thus the bank would never do such a deal unless you structured it a certain way: create a business, the account becomes property of the business, then Chase buys the business and thus the account. This is how certain Twitter accounts were sold a long time ago. $10k for @chasebank (which is what I assume your handle is) is quite good regardless, though.

Meta's aware and tries their best to act on it, but the real solution is simply not hiring outsourced support workers. It's really that simple. They have the money to hire people in-house for good wages, which would solve the root issue: the outsourced workers are desperate for money and gladly will take bribes.

Correct, which is the problem here - they don't want to, and you can't force them to.

Likely a bot spamming the reset endpoint to fetch your recovery method hints. Happens all the time. I'd ignore and just sign into your account via the app or website to make sure everything's fine. WhatsApp is indeed used to send reset codes to accounts if the phone number on file is registered to WhatsApp, but I'm unsure as to how that integration actually works, as I don't use WhatsApp.

Your account might be rate limited from performing additional password resets. Try the hacked account flow by selecting "Can't reset your password" (or whatever the app says) when trying to do a password reset. That's how I was able to sign back in despite being unable to request additional reset codes.

Have you lost your username? Instagram should allow you to revert it once you're back in.

You're lucky you weren't affected by this. Several people I know with three-letter usernames had theirs stolen over the last few days.

When I recovered my account that had been stolen through this exploit (luckily, my username hadn't been changed), I was sent a code to my email address and then asked to use my TOTP code, backup code, or a video selfie. I used my TOTP code and was let in just fine. They certainly have the ability to make such a feature. Keep in mind, however, that several unpatched TFA bypasses exist for Instagram currently. People offer it as a service for around $1,000 on Telegram. Where there's a TOTP code input, there's a way to bypass it.

Or sell it, and pocket some cash for yourself. If this person has a short or otherwise valuable username, they could sell it for possibly thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Meta has the capability to find out who authorized the change to this person's account. They log every change done in their administrator panel with a scary level of granularity, as far as I know, and they're able to take actions against employees who go behind Meta's back and take bribes (which, in joao's case, is what happened). This enforcement creates "waves" of account thefts described like so:

Suppose Mallory finds the contact information for Alice, an Instagram employee working overseas. Alice is paid next-to-nothing and wouldn't mind Mallory's extra cash. Mallory posts to their Telegram channel: "Instagram account takeovers for sale! Pay me $5,000+ and I'll take over ANY Instagram account". Mallory gets buyers lined up and promises to take over the accounts when Alice is working. The next day, when Alice signs on to the administrator tools, she sets each account's email address to the ones specified by Mallory, and Mallory pays her a percentage of what she charged. Mallory and Alice continue their scheme for about a week, when Meta finally investigates the situation, traces it to Alice's user account, bans or reverts every account Alice helped steal, and terminates her employment. However, no legal action takes place against Alice. Why? That part, I'm not so sure about. They're able to trace every action to Alice, and Alice is not anonymous, thus they have every ability to bring a case against her. Once Alice's employment is terminated, Mallory simply finds another employee willing to do their bidding. New hiring waves make this easy.

I'm happy to go into more detail about the underground Instagram account market. It's fascinating: people bragging about bribing employees and taking advantage of them, knowing their employment will be terminated, and actively showing off how much money they make. Meta has tried in the past to hit certain high-profile people with a cease & desist letter, but those are hard to enforce in certain jurisdictions.

What about Hotmail's "eh" flaw of 1999? I'd say a two-letter password is practically "zero auth".

While I agree with this, the hackers have an incentive to get in and out as soon as possible (at least, with accounts that have valuable usernames), because they want to swap the username over to an account they fully control before the rightful owner takes the account back. While DMs were read during this exploit in some cases (I've seen this be the case for several musicians), valuable usernames were likely signed into, swapped, and then signed out of. That's how rare username theft on Instagram generally works, anyways.

This is how account recovery procedures used to work at a certain gaming company. They used to train support agents on what makes an account high-value and apply additional scrutiny to those recovery cases, while letting low-value accounts be recovered with less information. It worked, for the most part, but because the valuation of a given account was based on the agent, some agents used to value accounts differently. You could get away with stealing a high-value account if you got the right agent in a support ticket. The tradeoff in this case was time spent - you'd have to create a lot of email addresses and plausible but vague tickets, though some attackers automated that process. Eventually, they just applied the same scrutiny level against every account and called it a day.

I've said this before, too. Several people I know have used various tricks and exploits to fix problems that support teams supposedly couldn't fix.

You might be interested in reading the court case against Eric Meiggs and Declan Harrington, which includes charges against the two involving extortion and SIM swapping for usernames. See page 10: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.215...

While it isn't directly "stealing", the government has brought charges against people in the past for username-related crimes. There are several similar cases, but this is the first one that came to mind.