Instagram, the photo and video sharing social networking website owned by Facebook is in news this week for all wrong reasons. Reports are out that a large portion of user passwords from the 268 million user base was leaked to the dark web recently due to a security flaw.
Instagram’s ‘Download Your Data’ tool is said to have done the above-said damage potentially exposing passwords to public view. Some Twitter users claim that the leaked info is now available for download as a PDF file on the dark web along with the usernames and contact details.
The freeware distributing company has started contacting affected users via email and has mentioned that their passwords stored on Facebook computers have been breached.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Instagram said that the issue was discovered internally in the last weekend and affected just a small portion of users, unlike claimed in the media. The spokesperson also mentioned that the bug has been patched and urged the service users to clear their browser history to prevent people from seeing the URLs that included their passwords.
Download Your Data tool was launched in April this year to comply with the EU’s GDPR regulation. Later in June’18, the tool was made available worldwide.
News resource “The Information,” says that those concerned can request Instagram for stored data via email. It’s said that the social media platform will reply back to the email within 48 hours with all the info it has collected regarding the user or username.
