Customer service chatbots have one job: get the user what they’re asking for without bothering a human. Meta’s new AI support assistant took that brief a little too seriously. Over the past few months, attackers have been opening support chats, telling the bot they were locked out of Instagram accounts they didn’t own, and walking away with the keys.
Over the weekend, Meta pushed an emergency patch after Instagram accounts belonging to the Obama White House (now dormant), beauty retailer Sephora, and a senior US Space Force official were taken over and briefly defaced with pro-Iranian imagery. Security researcher and former Meta employee Jane Manchun Wong was also hit.
How the trick worked
The attack was simple. Attackers worked out where the account owner lived (there are lists of account owners’ home cities online, or they could just research the target). Then they used a VPN to match the target account’s geographic region, which avoided raising flags with Instagram’s security systems.
Then they started a normal password reset and opened the support chat. They asked the AI bot providing support to change the email address on the account, and it did exactly that, sending a one-time code straight to the attacker’s inbox.
