[Translation] Hackers are selling Instagram users' personal information for about $10 worth of Bitcoin

This is a dangerous topic... Should we read it in Japanese right away?

Hackers Are Selling Instagram Users’ Personal Information for About $10 in Bitcoin

Instagram, a popular social media site, has about 700 million users.

According to several reports, due to a vulnerability on the website, hackers have stolen users’ personal information such as phone numbers and email addresses. At least one hacker group exploited the bug to extract confidential information from 6 million users. Kaspersky Labs then alerted Instagram, and Instagram fixed the bug.

The hackers who acquired the user data are currently selling it on the dark web for $10 per search, which at the time of this article's posting is about 0.002194 BTC. These hackers are known by the name “Doxagram,” a portmanteau of “doxing” (to expose) and Instagram, a photo-focused social media platform.

According to Kaspersky Labs security researchers who found the vulnerability, it resided in the API.

Specifically, through the password reset option, the hackers were able to access exposed phone numbers and email addresses in the JSON responses. The passwords themselves were not displayed. Initially, it was thought that the data could be extracted only manually, but the hackers later claimed to have automated the process.