They steal and use without permission thousands of Instagram social network accounts
A third-party application manages to get hold of hundreds of thousands of user accounts of the social network Instagram and impersonate you when posting on your behalf . It is a Instagram client or management application created by a third party and has achieved more than half a million downloads in both both in the App Store and in the Google Play Store, thus becoming one of the most viral malware tools that has crept into the main stores of applications
Its name is InstaAgent, and it has reached the hands of thousands of users by promising to provide data on who has or hasn't seen the user's Instagram photos Pretty tempting to know who prowls the user's profile without giving a Like to the photos and, therefore, without leaving a trace of its passage. However, the reality is very different, dedicating itself to harvesting user accounts and passwords of all those who used it, and evenpublishing in their name (and without any type of permission) photographs through the different infected profiles. Issue that has triggered all the alarms.
Thus, InstaAgent, which has managed to place itself this week among the most downloaded applications on the Apple's App Store, required the data of the Instagram user account to be able to know all these people who have supposedly passed through your profile.A list that had little or nothing to do with reality, and that actually hid a much more sinister mission. A developer investigated the application, discovering that once all this data was collected, it was sent unencrypted (without protection) to a server, where it was stored and used.
Some users have also become aware of this fact by discovering advertising photos on their own accounts that they have not posted that the applicationInstaAgent entered without any type of permission, repeating itself in many of the cases of the affected accounts.
Google it didn't take long to remove the app from the Google Play Storeafter discovering the fact. And Apple has taken a little longer to do the same.However, we must not forget that these companies verify the applications that they make available to users of their respective platforms, Android and iOS Which means there is a major security issueif an app with permissions to publish on behalf of the user (hidden, of course) sneaks into your stores and manages to go viral, affecting hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and even managing to reach the top of the lists of most downloaded applications.
In view of this situation, and if you are one of the affected users, it is best to access the Instagram social network through its web version , and revoke permissions for the InstaAgent application from the menu Application ManagementIn addition to this, it is imperative to modify the password of the account and create a totally new one to prevent another person or virus from using the collected data to continue publishing on your name.And of course get rid of the InstaAgent app
