The widespread hacking campaign that relied on simply asking Meta AI’s chatbot to take over a victim’s Instagram account appears to have continued even after the company said the issue had been resolved. Meanwhile, the company has been scrambling to secure the targeted accounts and alert victims.
Over the weekend, hackers claimed to be exploiting Meta’s AI support chatbot to take over several high-profile Instagram accounts. At the same time, a large number of people complained on social media that their Instagram accounts had been hacked, some of them with unique short user-profile handles.
TechCrunch has seen examples of allegedly hacked handles featuring common forenames or names of countries, which can be then re-sold almost as collectibles in a gray market for so-called “OG handles.” Other victims of the hacking spree appeared to be the dormant Obama White House account (which Meta disputed), and the account of the U.S. Space Force’s chief master sergeant, John Bentivegna.
These attacks were so simple that calling them hacks may be giving the people behind them too much credit, while at the same time not putting enough blame on Meta for not preventing rudimentary attacks from hijacking people’s accounts.
Hackers simply told Meta’s AI chatbot that they were the owners of the target’s account, and asked the bot to link that person’s account to an email they controlled. The chatbot complied with the request, allowing the hacker to reset the target account’s password and take control of the account — in some cases locking out the victims. At no point were Meta employees or contractors involved in the chat.
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AI (which is itself a lie since it has no intelligence - so, LLMs) have many flaws. The only things LLMs are really good at are all harmful, such as AI slop, hacking, very large scale surveillance, censorship, propaganda bots, and so on.
The use of "AI" agents, combined with open source and OSS supply chain attacks, results in basically infinite, never-ending attack vectors. There is no effective defense. Big, centralized systems are the most vulnerable to these attacks.
This crap is the new normal. On the plus side, the backlash will have people scrambling to build decentralized, privately owned, privately hosted (extremely secure) alternatives to all of the big-tech garbage. It can't happen soon enough.
Reason 6,459 to not be involved with social media.