Ask HN: Help for Instagram to restore the IG from my favorite thai restaurant

6 points

4 years ago

My local thai restaurant's instagram was recently hacked, and the only reason I really knew was the hacker tried to phish for my account by sending me a DM.

The timeline of the hack was

* Jan 12, 2021 - hacker got access to the account and change the e-mail

* Hacker immediately enabled two factor authentication.

Instagram's support page says 'If you did not make the request to change your Instagram profile email: You'll need to deny the request from the original email associated with your Instagram account. The email will come from [email protected] with a special link you can click to reverse the email change and help secure your account. Keep in mind that we only initiate this process after an email is changed from the Instagram Profile page and that we won't change your Instagram email without your permission.'

I went to the restaurant (they aren't that tech saavy so I was helping them out), and searched for e-mails from [email protected] and saw the one where the hacker changed the e-mail. I clicked the link and I was unable to revert the change. I helped the restaurant submit a video selfie.

A couple notes

1. Hackers seem to be exploiting a loophole where if they get access to the account they immediately are turning on 2fa locking out people.

2. The revert e-mail option definitely doesn't work .

Can anyone on instagram help out as this is a small mom and pop restaurant suffering from a myriad of instagram bureaucracy for doing something simple like account recovery.