14 DAY TRIAL // An unknown individual took over the Instagram account for Telethon, a 48-hour-long event in West Australia aiming to raise funds for children’s charities.
This year, the charitable action raised a record amount of money, in excess of AUD 25 / USD 22.2 / EUR 17.4 million.
On Sunday evening, after the event concluded, the official Instagram profile was hijacked by an unknown person who demanded AUD 1,000 / USD 890 / EUR 700 to relinquish control to its rightful owners.
The method used by the hijacker is not a complicated one as it is believed that he guessed the password for the account, which allowed unfettered access to its content, since the two-factor authentication (2FA) protection feature was not enabled.
Immediately after taking over the account, the individual started to delete all the images posted specifically for the fund raising event.
According to Steve Mummery,Telethon’s general manager, as a consequence of this action, the Instagram account suffered a loss in popularity, as more than 1,000 individuals stopped following it by Monday.
Getting back control over the profile seems to have been possible thanks to supporters of the charitable action, who managed to contact the owners with the password; hopefully, apart from a stronger countersign, 2FA was also turned on.