Instagram Fixed a Major Flaw that Allowed Hackers to Hack Any Account
Jul. 21, 2019The researcher took it tohis blogto explain how he managed to find a flaw that allowed him to hack any account. According to the blog, he had initially tried to test the web interface of Instagram for vulnerabilities and couldn’t find one which led him to explore mobile-based techniques.
Mr. Muthiyah approached this vulnerability byRace HazardandIP rotation. In case you’re not aware of what Race Hazard is, it is the condition of a system where it misbehaves on getting multiple requests at the same time. He claims that he had used 1000 different machines in his tests to send 200k requests. You can check out the video he uploaded proving his claims below.
He has further stated that in real attacks, the attacker would need around 5000 IPs which can be easily rented from cloud service providers like Amazon or Google in less than 150 dollars. Facebook team acknowledged the vulnerability and rewarded Laxman Muthiyah with a bug bounty of $30000.
Luckily, this got noticed by a security researcher. If this vulnerability had got spotted and exploited by a black hat hacker, it’d have put the privacy of the entire platform at stake. So, what are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments.
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