This is how hackers deceive some Instagram 'influencers'

We live in the age of influencers. That is, they have always existed, it is not something that we should have as a novelty. There have always been people with 'influence' due to their popularity. This popularity, whether hard-won by their work or heaven-sent by a 'celebrity' lineage, gives them great power as, with their actions, they can 'influence' their followers. Does a brand want its yellow jacket to become fashionable? You just have to get in touch with an influencer and that's it.Simply, now there are highly visible channels and, to a large extent, dedicated to the exhibition of these influencers, be it in a matter of fashion, beauty, design, gastronomy, etc.

Influencers' accounts on Instagram often have thousands (if not millions) of followers. For example, Chiara Ferragni has more than 15 million followers on her Instagram account. Selena Gomez, from another galaxy, goes to 144 million followers. In Spain we find characters like Dulceida, with 2 million followers or the model from Denia Cindy Kimberly with almost 3 and a half million. Figures that make any cybercriminal salivate, who will put everything on the spit to try to get hold of one of these accounts.

Be careful with the links we access, they may not be legitimate

The story that we are going to tell you next has been collected by the Internet medium The Atlantic. Last October, a publicist received an offer that was difficult to reject in his email inbox. One of this publicist's clients was one of those influencers who has thousands of followers. One of the most common jobs of the influencer today is to publish a photo of himself with the brand in question, in exchange for a certain amount of money. In this case, the figure went up to 80 thousand dollars for a single photo. An offer too tempting to pass up… even if it would have been the most sensible thing to do.

The publicist took very little time to respond affirmatively to the offer made by a certain 'Joshua Brooks'. This Brooks had apparently worked with actresses like Bella Thorne and Amanda Cerny. To start their contractual relationship, the influencer only had to log in with his Instagram credentials in athird-party application called IconosquareIt was not something that raised the suspicions of the influencer too much, since there are many cases in which companies need third-party statistics tools, associated with Instagram accounts. In this way, brands can follow, in detail, the evolution of their commercial strategy.

An account lost in a matter of seconds

The link that was sent after the offer was accepted was, of course, not a truthful link. The influencer ended up on a page that offered a clone version of Iconosquare (you always have to look at the URLs of the sites you enter, it's not the same to be on iconosquare.com, a real site, than iconosquare.biz, a cloned site with fraudulent intentions). Within minutes, once the celebrity had entered his password on the fake statistics site, his account was sending free iPhone promotions to his millions of followers. His account had been hacked.

In the last month, this hackerhas taken over several accounts of influencersor viral and varied content such as @Chorus, with the more than 10 million followers of him. It is essential to act responsibly, especially when managing accounts with such a large number of followers. You always have to watch where you click and act cautiously when faced with good offers that seem like a lie... because they surely are.