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INSTAGRAM 1 MILLION ACCOUNTS CAN BE HACKED WITHIN 10 MINUTES

Recently, a researcher ‘Laxman Muthiyah‘ from Chennai has found a vulnerability which could allow the hack over of more than 1 million accounts within the minimum, 10 minutes. As stated by him in a blog post, when a user requests for the password reset then Instagram issues a unique randomly generated identifier to each device.

Then the device ID reaches all the devices, which further requests for passcode from them during the Password Reset Process. Instagram using the same device ID verifies the users and all the devices.

Laxman while analyzing this Device ID feature and found out that it is possible to request passcodes for multiple accounts from a single device. It was possible to link a single device or the same Device ID to multiple passcodes for different accounts.

Thus, the probability or the chances of successfully hacking the accounts increase with the increasing number of passcodes requested on a specific device. He further explained in his blog post that for a six-digit passcode there can be one million probabilities that are the numbers could range from 000001 to 999999.

If we request, the passcodes from the same device for 10,000 users the probability of success is 10% but if the number of passcodes requested increases to one million the success rate turns out to be 100%.

Thus, greater the number of passcodes requested by a single device greater are the chances of it being taken over by the attacker. So, eventually, the success of the attack further increases to 100 % by incrementing the passcodes one by one.

As the Instagram passcode is valid only for 10 minutes the entire attack by the hacker takes place within that time limit. To proof his concept of exploitation he used more than a thousand of cloud machine instances.

His method bypasses the Brute Force attack detection technique which Instagram uses to prevent any sort of attacks by unauthorized actors. Previously, Muthiyah had found three Facebook vulnerabilities and had won bug bounty payouts for them.

Another vulnerability was discovered by Laxman last month which allows the attacker to hack any Instagram account by using multiple IPs. The severity of the flaw reported was very high even though it had a limiting factor that the passcode expires within 10 minutes. Facebook rewarded him with $30,000 of bug bounty.

The new flaw is relatively less vulnerable than the previous one reported by him. This time Facebook rewarded the Chennai techie with a bounty of $10,000, as a part of the Tech Giant’s Bug Bounty program.

The bug is now patched and the users are now safe from this vulnerability the photo and video sharing application was earlier open to.

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