My friends Instagram was hacked and deep-fake videos posted in less than 6 hours
102 by k4runa | 58 comments on Hacker News.
Today has been wild. I am quite shocked at how quickly the whole thing happened and how difficult it is to report the hacked account to instagram and try recover the account. The docs seem to take you in a loop without ever being able to resolve the problem... My friends instagram account has only ~2,000 followers, so not even a huge amount, and her email and password was reset about 6pm to a gmail account, and by midnight the account had already posted deep-faked AI videos of her promoting cryptocurrency scams. The deepfake videos are very realistic too, if I hadn't know her better or know about the hacking it would be very easy to believe it was real... It's possible they deep-faked her videos ahead of time but it seems like something you'd only spend resources on only if you knew the attack was successful. And there doesn't seem to be that much news or content online about this happening or it seems very targeted... but for such an account with such a small following it seems like it must be quite widespread problem. Have you had this happen to someone you know personally and what do you think about how prepared we are to deal with scams this sophisticated or what effect they might have?