Instagram hacked? Recover success with your account
According to Mashable the last week, for unexplained reasons, significantly more Instagram accounts have been hacked than normal. Several victims have reported themselves and when you look at the Twitter account of Instagram you see that in the last week hundreds of accounts have reported with the story that their account has been taken from them.
What happens is the same everywhere: users can no longer log in and if they try to do so they discover that their password has changed. If they try to restore it via e-mail, it appears that the linked address has changed, so far always to a .ru (ie Russian) account. In many cases, the Instagram name and avatar had also changed.
Hard to get back
The victims are not ‘big’ Instagrammers and based on the examples they found, they have a few thousand followers. Nice enough to pick up, but not big enough that there is a lot of fuss. And that’s smart, because the system that Instagram uses to get your account back makes it extremely difficult to get into your account once the data has changed from the inside.
This has mainly to do with the fact that the process from Instagram is largely automated. It ensures that you end up in a kind of circle that you can not escape from and that do not bring you any closer to your account. Of the people who have been hacked, a few have recovered their account, but not after they have had to undergo an “extremely stressful” process.
Start again
Some have just created a new account, because they do not feel that fixing these situations for Instagram is a priority. That does not mean that it is impossible, but it is ultimately very difficult to find * someone * who can help you, and then the internal guidelines of Instagram make it very difficult to get your account back.
As long as the system of Instagram is built on the assumption that you can not enter without being the rightful owner, it remains very difficult to address the theft of online identity. A bot does not understand that you do not have any of the details of an account, while you are (and were) the rightful owner until recently. Even two-factor authentication does not stop hackers, at least not as long as you have to use a telephone . Instagram itself has announced that they will support other authenticators but until now that is not yet possible and you are still vulnerable. If your Insta account is important to you (as an influencer or otherwise) you would still do well to look at the possibilities to make it more secure than now, because once your account is gone, it becomes clearly a difficult game.