{getMailchimp} $title={MailChimp Form} $text={Subscribe to our mailing list to get the new updates.}

Selena Gomez ‘Concerned’ Hackers May Release Private Pics, Other Instagram Stars Bracing for Leak

Some of the world’s most high-profile Instagram users are nervously waiting to see if their private pictures and messages have been accessed in the ‘Doxagram’ hack.

Pop star Selena Gomez’s account was accessed by the hackers this week. They posted nude photos of her ex Justin Bieber on her account.

The posting of the pictures appears to have been a stunt to draw attention to the hack rather than the fruits of the hack itself, as the pictures of Bieber were already in the public domain.

Now, however, comes the more worrying possibility that other intimate images may have been accessed.

Joseph Cox of The Daily Beast reported last night that the hackers appear to have successfully extracted some Instagram users’ personal info, including email addresses and phone numbers, which they have now placed online at the ‘Doxagram’ website, a hastily constructed $10-a-pop searchable database.

Many of the targets and names listed are Instagram’s biggest stars. The hackers told Cox they set up their scraper to initially target all users with over 1 million followers, and then recursively harvest other users.
 
Gomez is the world’s most-followed Instagram user with 126 million followers (up a million since Tuesday).

In all, the hackers claimed to The Daily Beast to have over 6 million accounts in their database, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies. The data also seems to contain information on more ordinary accounts, too, Cox reported.

This morning The Sun tabloid in the UK reported that stars such as Gomez were alive to the possibility of private photos and messages from their Instagram accounts being leaked next.

A source told The Sun: “Many of the biggest celebrities in the world will be very concerned about this.”

“Many use Instagram for chatting privately and swapping pics with friends. A lot will be hastily deleting things to stop anything embarrassing getting out in the hope that it’s not too late.”

The Instagram cyberattack follows a string of high-profile hacks on stars.

Last week, dozens of nude photographs of celebrities including Tiger Woods, his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Vonn, Miley Cyrus and Kristen Stewart were released on an internet porn site.

The images were widely copied and shared across the internet, much as images were after a series of hacks of iCloud accounts in 2014. That hack included Jennifer Lawrence among its victims.

Lawrence called the hacking and publication of her private images a “sex crime” in an interview with Vanity Fair, and the person ultimately found to be responsible, Ryan Collins, a Pennsylvania man, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. 

Collins used a phishing scheme to obtain the login credentials of at least 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts, most of which belonged to female celebrities, over a period of almost two years.

TMZ reported that the images of Woods and Vonn were hacked from Vonn's phone.

They include images of Woods and the Olympic gold medalist skier that the pair sent to each other when they were in a relationship.

Woods, 41, and Vonn, 32, split in May, 2015. It is not currently known whether the recent hacks are related.

No comments

Your comments and Encouragement are welcome