Do you dream of having Beyonce or Robert Downey Jr endorsing your brand? Well, it seems for some it’s been easier (and cheaper ) than you’d think. In fact, they even got paid for the pleasure!
We all know that getting celebrities on board with anything you are trying to market is a great way to grow your brand and reach as many people as possible but paying them an influencer rate can be expensive.
But, one group of hackers have managed to get a celebrity endorsement for free by hacking a range of stars’ Instagram accounts to push scam sites to their millions of followers.
According to SecurityAffairs.co Robert Downey Jnr, Nicole Scherzinger, Yanet Garcia and Chloe Moretz are the latest celebs to have links to surveys posted to their Instagram accounts, so hackers could collect personal information.
The hackers are set to earn a pretty penny too as they will get paid for the data and a fee per survey completed.
While it’s obvious the accounts have been hacked people are still willing to take part in the surveys for two reasons.
They either think they have the chance to win one of 2000 iPhone XS’ or in the case of Scherzinger and Garcia, participants were promised the link to see a sex tape!
It's not been a good year for Instagram.
Back in May, a database containing the contact information of millions of influencers, celebrities and brand accounts was found online.
The database, which was hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside, it is believed more than 50 million records were breached.
Security researcher Anurag Sen discovered the database and alerted TechCrunch, who then found several high-profile influencers in the exposed database, including food bloggers, celebrities and other social media influencers.
This breach came just two years after Instagram admitted a security bug in its developer API allowed hackers to obtain the email addresses and phone numbers of six million Instagram accounts.
The hackers later sold the data for bitcoin.
This is just the latest breach of celebrity accounts after a huge number of ‘personal’ photos were accessed from iCloud accounts and it seems people still aren’t heeding the warnings despite the data which is at risk.
We keep talking about the value of multi-factor authentication and this is just another reason for everyone to add a second layer of security to their accounts.
It really couldn’t be simpler either, so make sure you’re not another statistic by securing your Instagram account now and use multi-factor authentication wherever possible.