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Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
- toomuchtodo 5mo agohttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-maine/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-... https://www.maine.gov/agviewer/content/ag/985235c7-cb95-4be2-8792-a1252b4f8318/686120c8-63be-4e3c-b7ed-466d65b672f5.html https://www.maine.gov/agviewer/content/ag/985235c7-cb95-4be2...
- sva_ 5mo ago> Date(s) Breach Occured: 04/17/2026 > Date Breach Discovered: 05-31-2026
- mcintyre1994 5mo agoI’m guessing they have no functional human support for the people who had their accounts stolen. I get the impression Meta didn’t know this was happening until they were contacted by the media.
- Terr_ 5mo ago> no functional human support I've seen some reporting saying exactly that. [0] It might be a "first-world problem", but having an account lost without appeal can justly be labeled "traumatic", especially if post-COVID it represents a majority of your social (or para-social) life. [0] https://www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/ https://www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give...
- Chu4eeno 5mo ago> It might be a "first-world problem", but having an account lost without appeal can justly be labeled "traumatic", especially if post-COVID it represents a majority of your social (or para-social) life. Also possibly illegal under GDPR section 22.
- Cyan488 5mo ago> "The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account," said Meta in its breach notice. I'm not sure "worked properly" and "as intended" accurately describe this situation.
- ludwik 5mo agoI like to dunk on Meta as much as the next guy, but I think this makes sense: deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job. The tools it has access to should enforce the permissions layer, ensuring that the LLM can never perform actions the user themselves should not be allowed to perform. In this case, the tool failed to do that.
- jffyjcaa 5mo ago[dead]
- TZubiri 5mo ago>deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job. But when humans handled it, this was not as much as a problem. That is, the humans did the job, because they recognized the need to do that job. Sure sometimes accounts could get recovered if a human was tricked, but evidently it was easier to trick the LLM in masse than humans.
- ajross 5mo ago> But when humans handled it, this was not as much as a problem. In fact it's arguably a feature. The ability of support staff to short-circuit nitpicky rules when there's an obvious external validation happening (e.g. you're on the phone with a user who's presenting ID in real time and correlating it with previous use of the account, etc...) makes for better data quality and happier customers. Obviously, yes, you can then human-engineer an authentication breach. But that was very difficult, because people are "common-sense careful" in a way we haven't been able to tease out of AI yet.
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoThis was on hacker news a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102) - description of the “hack”, not the cockamamie confirmation by Meta.
- jamwise 5mo agoThis is wild. How did anyone approve this architecture. You should never give your LLM privileged access the current user doesn't have access to. Even if you're not logged in the LLM's tool calls should only be able to access the same flow you would, as in: be able to send a password reset email to your own email! This is like if you had a password reset page for your profile and had a email field you could fill in to have it sent to any email LOL.
- rvz 5mo agoIf this was a bank that had zero humans and the AI chatbot was abused to hand over sensitive information about their customers which led to this disaster, people would never trust their bank ever again and leave. Meta believes that they can vibe-code their reputation down the drain by removing humans in the loop. Applying a technical solution to a social problem almost always ends in disasters like this. Reputation can’t be vibe-coded.
- CivBase 5mo agoMeta's brand is already toxic. Idk if there's much to lose there.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoBuying more. The vibe here is getting close to 2021
- cyanydeez 5mo ago"abusing" by using it's built in insecurity to do insecure things. It's like, people abusing an open door. "Guys, just because we left the door open to your bedroom doesn't mean we're responsible". God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit.
- lazide 5mo agoIt won’t be. also this is more like them leaving the keys in the door, then someone comes along, uses the keys, and steals all your stuff. truthfully, no equipment is actually defective in this scenario eh?
- topaz0 5mo agoIf we're nitpicking metaphors I think it's more accurate to say it's like they were taking requests to rekey the lock on your door.
- teaearlgraycold 5mo ago> God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit. You realize this is the company that enabled a genocide and got away with it? Not to mention accelerating teenager suicides with full knowledge.
- cyanydeez 5mo agowhy epse would i invoke a mythical diety
- phyzome 5mo agoCorrected headline: "Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked due to their insecure AI chatbot".
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jhhh 5mo agoWhy was 'can a user request a different email' not literally the first test that comes to mind when making something like this? Do they not test anything because the scale is too big?
- joshuat 5mo agoIn their defense, they asked the LLM to make no mistakes
- SXX 5mo agoAnd it did no mistakes. System worked exactly as LLM intended.
- TZubiri 5mo agoBecause software professionals are conflating simplicity of user experience with simplicity of dev experience. During development they were likely not thinking of the user experience, nor even the support agent experience, but on their development experience, they asked the LLM to develop the chatbot, and it worked, and the speed was documented and reported upstream so that shareholders invest, if there is any forethought it would go against the narrative of AI becoming the engineer or 100xing productivity.
- gdulli 5mo agoThe nature of the invention is for people to relieve themselves of the burden of having to use their minds. And while there will be exceptions, (including, I'm sure you: the person reading this comment,) the vast majority of people are hungry to use AI in that spirit of being able to be lazy.
- quantummagic 5mo agoLazy can be a good thing. Since time and attention are finite and not fungible, it allows you to do something else. There's a reason we're all too lazy to do long arithmetic with pen and paper, instead relieving the burden of using our minds by outsourcing to spreadsheets and calculators. Not only does it allow us to think at a higher level of abstraction, but it also means we can take our kids to the park more often.
- webbdev 5mo agoMeanwhile an account I created for a new product was permanently disabled by an automated system with no path for me to appeal to a human. (If anyone at Meta/Instagram sees this I wrote a brief blog post with the details. Please help! https://addisonwebb.com/blog/2026-06-05-Can%20Someone%20at%20Meta%20Help%20Restore%20Park%20Guide's%20Instagram%20Account/ https://addisonwebb.com/blog/2026-06-05-Can%20Someone%20at%2... )
- TZubiri 5mo agoDid you create the account separately? Or as an asset of your main Meta account (like Meta Business Suite)? I'm creating the accounts in Meta Business Suite, so I would have a recourse with my main personal account which can be linked to some adspend, so I'm assuming it will have better support channels than accounts created through an end-user interface.
- webbdev 5mo agoThis was probably my mistake. This is the first time I've ever done this so I just set up an account like a regular user. I didn't figure out how to link it with my Meta Business Suite until it was too late.
- TZubiri 5mo agojust created a new "Asset portfolio" from my main facebook account, an asset portfolio is like a bucket that holds other assets like instagram accounts, but it's empty so far. I used a different email which might have prompted a security review, it was instantly blocked "because it looks like it was created with unauthorized automation", I just clicked on submit a review and it asked for a phone number to verify with a code, and then an ID. I think this is pretty standard, the initial block reason can be whatever, it just works as a de facto way for Meta to manually approve accounts. There's a lot of spam, and scams going on, so it makes sense that they are implementing controls, I for one am happy to differentiate myself from people whose job it is to make multiple accounts and promote fake stories and businesses to scam the elderly or stuff like that.
- 5mo ago
- Havoc 5mo ago>AI-assisted account recovery system oh no...Meta what are you doing
- rf15 5mo agoThat sweet koolaid taste, how could one resist? ...They really ahouldn't have, and I wonder how this will affect all the big AI IPOs. After all, Meta is one of the big players in the space. Surely if they can't do it right, then...
- acdha 5mo agoThat’s the part I keep thinking about with this story: they have spent over $200 billion dollars on AI and achieved this.
- mschuster91 5mo agoAccount recovery is by far the #1 kind of ticket any service will get. Either because people forget their credentials, lose their credentials, get hacked or get impersonated - and that's just the legitimate tickets, on top of that come illegitimate tickets from everyday script kiddies over ransom extortioners (i.e. the people that aim to steal "valuable" handles) to nation-state actors that, say, want to get access to DMs of people messaging oppositional accounts. That in turn means three things... it costs a lot of money to have humans look at these tickets, the PR damage from both acting and not acting on such requests can be immense, and users/customers can be anything from the smartest and richest people on the world down to the kind of utter imbeciles whose brains get surpassed by bears [1] or who plainly are not able to write. To make it worse, often enough online services don't have any kind of tie back to some known government-issued ID (either directly or by a proxy such as a mobile phone SIM), there's corruption involved on all levels, and for particularly "juicy" targets the stakes, if they can be converted to a monetary amount at all, can reach into the millions of dollars. Now, Instagram alone has 3 billion (!) users from across the world, so they are bound to not just having to spend a lot of money on user support (remember, we are talking about the entire world, they also need to deal with about 7.000 (!) actively spoken languages, and having attack targets that are as powerful as US Presidents or as rich as Elon Musk. Clearly, the risk management involved in the entire idea was horribly deficient, but let's not act like this is a trivial problem domain in the first place. And hence the push for AI, simply because it - if done correctly - can take a lot of work off of the first-level support desks for a fraction of the money. [1] https://velvetshark.com/til/til-smartest-bears-dumbest-tourists-overlap https://velvetshark.com/til/til-smartest-bears-dumbest-touri... [2] https://www.sapiens.org/language/world-languages-counting-methods/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/world-languages-counting-me...
- _RPM 5mo agoProbably some product manager pushed back on security considerations raised by engineers.
- whirlwin 5mo agoI got a suspicious password reset request email today from Meta but it landed in my inbox. Luckily I have MFA and after checking audit logs inside IG upon logging in, I did not see anything suspicious.
- notrealyme123 5mo ago2FA did not help according to the primary finding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102
- whirlwin 5mo agoIn that case it sounds like the last waves of malicious reset attempts happened after the patch was put in place
- zahirbmirza 5mo agoAnd who said cameras linked to Meta in their glasses were a good idea?
- dwa3592 5mo agoI really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.
- jeffbee 5mo agoSomehow this company still earns over a billion dollars a week in net profits, which I find puzzling.
- herpdyderp 5mo agoRealistically, how will this affect Meta at all? Some people are pissed, nobody else cares, business as usual.
- pluc 5mo agoBy "abusing" they mean "using"
- globular-toast 5mo agoNo, it's still abuse. Just like it's still stealing even if I left my front door unlocked.
- pluc 5mo agoIt's not stealing if you give it to me, regardless of your door
- sebastiennight 5mo agoThe appropriate metaphor would rather be your landlord deciding to renovate the entire back wall of your apartment/house to make it an open-air design. People coming in from the street to hang out and rifle through your belongings would still be "abusing" the system according to the law, but it's hard to not consider the landlord somewhat responsible.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- johnyzee 5mo ago"Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised. [...] The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person's entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages, and account activity [...] the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week [...]" This is staggering.
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- Lionga 5mo agoOne can only hope EU gives them a GDPR fine very close to the limit of 4% of global turnover. But when EU is actually need to protect customer I think they will fail.
- mvkel 5mo agoIncidents like this show how unenforceable GDPR is, and how it's been a net negative for users since its inception. It's idealogical back-patting, toothless when it matters.
- Gigachad 5mo agoAfter the GDPR every website added an option to export your personal data and to delete your account. Something most were missing at the time. It was an immediate and massive win.
- hn773746483 5mo agoRight, but nothing stops companies from refusing SARs on baloney grounds. Complain to a DPA? They tell you to go through ADR or outright ignore you. Complain to Ombudsman? They'll tell you the same. (In my experience, the Dutch do this) Company ignores ADR? Sure, now you can go through the legal route and spend copious amounts of money all because a multi billion dollar company knows the game and how to navigate the bureaucratic mess better than you.
- dansquizsoft 5mo agoYou only have to look at both the ridiculiously terrible "Q&A chatbot" that is in FaceBook under some posts (do they still have this?) and the fact that their system can't tell the difference between an inappropriate and a non-inappropriate comment most of the time to understand just how far behind Meta is in AI...
- Fairburn 5mo agoAre we winning yet?
- alvis 5mo agohow on earth a password reset API would take both email address and account id as parameters? The chat bot is fine. I bet it's the API written by AI the issue
- paulpauper 5mo agoImagine how much $ ppl could have made hijacking famous accounts to promote crypto or other crap. I wonder how often this happened.
- empiree 5mo agoYet another reminder that most of these chatbots get shipped way before they're ready. Loud marketing, security treated as an afterthought, all to ride the AI hype. LLMs open up a whole new attack surface and a lot of teams still treat prompt injection like a fun edge case. This is what happens when you ship the demo instead of the product.
- Lionga 5mo agoJust AI Slop doing AI Slop things
- tomashertus 5mo agoMove fast and break things.
- smrtinsert 5mo agoHow do business owners hire people from Meta knowing these types of "bugs" get deployed with a shrug? Meta will survive them. Their business might not.
- RgrTheShrubbr 5mo agoThe AI passed the Turing Test by becoming the world's most trusting customer service rep.
- hero4hire 5mo agoPeople were reporting their accounts were being taken over with proper 2fa. Everyone had wondered how they hackers could take over accounts with little information, people were saying "inside job." This is exactly the stupid explanation I expected. Your privacy and security. Meta. Serious Business.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- zuzululu 5mo ago> as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages god dang!! we are going to see some juicy stuff
- thraway3837 5mo agoHas the data surfaced somewhere? A lot of IG accounts are private by choice, and this kind of data, if surfaced publicly, could have devastating privacy violations. People share all kinds of stuff on there, a lot of it not meant for public consumption. I'm not wanting a debate on "well you shouldn't put anything private on Facebook's servers or the internet blah blah blah". I'm just curious if the actual contents of the hack have been surfaced.
- boppo1 5mo agoIs there a way to check if I was affected? Does Meta know who was affected?
- the_black_hand 5mo agoI'll never understand using AI/bot for customer support. IG is a well know platform. If I have an issue I feel pressed to connect with a support agent about it very likely is something a bot would struggle with, otherwise I'd just google. I understand there some grandmas who can do a google search, but the vast majority of folks reaching out for support are doing so because they have a real issue that can't be simply automated. Furthermore, having a bot handle a hacked account is support ticket is just insane. Why tf would you put a bot there and give it permission to take action?
- madrasman 5mo agoUnlike programmers, most people don’t read long help articles or take multi-step actions. Bots can answer questions directly and take actions (or guide a user through step by step).
- itsnkr2293 5mo agoWhere is the security left now?
- anonzzzies 5mo agoIs there a tl;dr? are these people getting their accounts back?
- butler14 5mo agoSilicon Valley’s finest
- hayaan25929 5mo agoMeta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
- hayaan25929 5mo agoJust.me_samiyy hacked
- latexr 5mo agoMeta is clearly staying true to their ethos. “Move fast and break things”, “ask for forgiveness, not permission”, “have your security researcher delete their own email email by accident and then refuse to learn anything and use that same system to manage user accounts”.
- naik11 5mo agoI want to hacke one instgram account
- sspoisk 5mo ago[flagged]
- epsteingpt 5mo agoThe crazy thing is the 20000 accounts won't just be randoms, but some of the top accounts.
- malikusama0008 5mo agogcuflc_confessions2023
- malikusama0008 5mo agoHo
- malikusama0008 5mo agoHack this account gcuflc_confessions2023
- malikusama0008 5mo agoHo
- beyondscaletech 5mo ago[flagged]
- willXare 5mo ago[flagged]
- itskamran 5mo agowhat best we can expect from Meta....the shameless founder and shameless policies and security....
- jasonperez77 5mo agoNo 2FA required for this to work. People who didn't turn it on got hosed. Meta should have just forced 2FA for everyone ages ago.
- KennHawk 5mo ago[flagged]