How to protect your Instagram account from Phishing attack

ISLAMABAD: What began as a daily ritual of countless people scrolling through Instagram, just turned into a shocking incident. All of a sudden, the inboxes of Instagram users were flooded with password reset emails, and each one looked just like an official security message coming from Instagram.

For some users, the fear of losing their accounts came almost immediately. However, they were not aware that this was actually a very big leak of data that would soon be referred to as “behind the emails”.

A leak that gave access to dark web criminals and exposed millions of accounts with their sensitive information. Moreover, that exposed information became a target for further cybercrime activities as the users were unaware of the danger.

Worldwide, millions of social media users are still jolted by the unanticipated receipt of password reset emails that were identical to those sent by Instagram, resulting in the fear of one of the largest social media breaches in the last few years.

Instagram Password Change Scam Update

Several news organizations have confirmed that this is indeed a huge official data leak (and not just a trick email), which makes using 2FA for securing your account more critical than ever!

Instagram has not commented yet on the issue of why these password reset requests sometimes do not appear under “recent emails” or on the breach in general.

Cybersecurity professionals were able to trace the emails back to a huge data leak that impacted around 17.5 million Instagram accounts. The incident involved the theft of sensitive data through an API vulnerability in late 2024, and the information was sold on the dark web, which in turn endangered millions of users to phishing, identity theft, and account hijacking.

The leaked records include users’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes even their home addresses, which is more than enough for hackers to pass as users or to try stealing their credentials through different methods.