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And the hackers again. Hundreds of Instagram users are reporting that their accounts have been hacked, stolen or blocked. A Russian link is allegedly behind many of these incidents. According to mashable.com, Instagram, which is under Facebook, has not confirmed the problem with hacking of its users' accounts. However, there is evidence that shows that there has been a significant increase in hacked Instagram accounts this month.

“Although Instagram has more than 1 billion users, it claims that it has not noticed any hacker attacks. However, if we look at Twitter, since the beginning of the month, users have sent almost 800 tweets with the word hack to the official Instagram account, in order to alert the company to the problem. If we compare it with last month, there were only about 40 similar tweets. At the same timeit is very easy to find the most common searches on Reddit or Google Trends. The phrase "Instagram hacked" was at the top on both August 8 and August 11."

In connection with the theft of the account, the affected persons notify the change of the data in the profile, including the e-mail address and telephone number, which will make it impossible to recover the account. In a number of cases monitored by Karissa Bell of mashable.com, the changed email address had a .ru suffix.

“We have identified several common elements between the attacks by which the accounts were stolen. Often the profile photo was changed immediately, most often to some animated character from Pixar or Disney. Furthermore, the BIO of the profile is often overwritten or completely deleted, and the new e-mail address often ends with the Russian suffix .ru."

In the gallery, you can see cases of hacked accounts and the frequency of searches for the phrase "instagram hacked":

It should be added that most victims did not use two-factor authentication, which consists of entering a password and then entering a six-digit code, which is most often sent to the user via SMS. But even this method does not seem to be completely safe. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has described the two-factor authentication method as obsolete, as hackers are often successful in intercepting coded SMS messages sent to users.

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