A phishing campaign by email aimed at French Instagram users has been identified, indicates the Numerama site on Thursday. Hackers pretend to be the social network and make their victim believe that he is eligible for the certification of his account and that he can therefore obtain the blue dot attached to his identifier, a symbol of success. More than 2,000 fraudulent emails have been sent every day since the end of July, specifies the company specializing in cybersecurity Vade, which has spotted this phishing technique.
This operation aims to recover the personal data of users of the social network. In their fraudulent email, the hackers announce to the user that his Instagram account has been examined by the group and that he can now obtain the blue dot.
They then invite the recipient of the message to click on a link, to give their identifiers and to fill in a form in which the name, the telephone number, the email address of the user and the password of their account must be filled in. . In a last page, the fake platform assures that the profile is verified and that Instagram will contact the victim within 48 hours – which will not happen -, explains Numerama.
Graphic identity reproduced
Instagram does not send an email to offer the certification of an account, if the user has not requested it upstream, warns the specialized site.
The phishing email is “impressive in its way of reproducing the graphic identity of Instagram”, recognized Florent Cahagne, expert at Vade, with Numerama. “There is no spelling mistake, the message is clean and understandable. The data recovered by hackers can be resold or reused to access other sites, warned the expert.