Threat actors compromised multiple high-profile Instagram accounts last week by simply asking Meta’s AI-powered account recovery assistant to hand them over.
The attackers exploited a logic flaw in the AI assistant, a classic ‘confused deputy’ issue, to have their own email addresses linked to the targeted accounts and take them over.
Confused deputy weaknesses have been known to security researchers for decades and involve tricking a deputy that has elevated privileges into performing specific actions on the attacker’s behalf.
In this case, the Meta AI assistant had API access to account management systems, being deployed to help users re-link email addresses, reset passwords, and verify they are the owners of specific accounts.
Due to the logic flaw, hackers were able to simply ask the chatbot to link a targeted account to a new email address, under the pretense that they had been hacked or that they had lost access to the previously linked email address.
