Instagram users are still being hacked every day and a new adult-themed scam campaign is slowly taking over accounts of as hackers replace the account's pictures with sexually suggestive ones.
User profiles who have been targeted by the hackers may find their accounts filled with different photos of almost naked women with their usernames and description changed. The hackers have also left a short TinyURL link that sends users to an adult-site.
These hackers earn money through the affiliate adult-themed scam as each register they get from the links they leave at the hacked Instagram posts gives them fees. Instagram accounts who have been hacked mostly have different user names, profile images of a sexy woman and other sexually suggestive photos not uploaded by the original user, The Register has learned.
Some of the hacked accounts are even left by the original owners who forgot the password. It becomes profitable for the hackers if the account they compromise has thousands of followers as they can be fooled into clicking the affiliate scam links.
Another way of finding out if an Instagram account is hacked is by browsing through all the photos. The hackers do not delete the original photos of the owner which can stand out especially if the owner was male.
The hackers can also change the passwords of the accounts they compromise to prevent deleting their photos and changed bio especially if it has many followers, Symantec reported. It forces the original owners to create new accounts instead of trying to recover their first Instagram account.
Symantec has also observed that several of the Instagram hack accounts do not upload sexy photos at all but they profile bios are still changed and sprinkled with the scam links. It could be that they are becoming lazy or maybe they think that the original name of the Instagram account owner plus the photos will net them more users who are not that skeptic.
In order to avoid being hacked, Instagram users may want to change their passwords regularly. They can also take advantage of Instagram's two-factor authentication method that could prevent unwanted logins even if the hackers know their passwords.