Fake Instagram Hacking Services

Instagram hacking scams is an old-new direction of online fraud that targets people who want to get into someone’s accounts on social media. Frauds poison search results, gather the users interested in such a service and push them to shady pages or ones that promote commercial spyware. A key risk for users here is the possibility of money loss, malware injection, or identity theft.

Instagram Account Hacking Scams Overview

Hacking into someone’s Instagram account was – and remains – a dream for quite a few people out there. Moral aspect of this, well, I won’t discuss that in that article, but the scammers definitely aim at exploiting this gray-zone wish. Quite a few websites popped up recently, offering the ability to hack the password of any Instagram account in just a few clicks.

Upon opening the site and entering the username in question, the user will see the alleged Instagram hacking process. Some of the sites talk about performing a brute force attack (which is fairly realistic), while others are “injecting commands” or “RCE injections“. For anyone who is at least remotely familiar with how these things work, these sites look as nothing but ridiculous lies.

List of scam hacking websites (updating)

But the ending of all this is even more interesting. The site shows the alleged “Hack successful” page, but then a pop-up message appears saying that the account is well-protected. For hacking it, the user should click the button and follow the instructions. And this is where the main course of this scam kicks in.

In my observation, the button on several different websites redirected me to a payment page of a shady commercial spyware; each scam appears to promote a different one. Buying the spyware should allegedly help with accessing this Instagram account. However, other people, particularly from North America, report about the click throwing them to other, much less safe sites. Among them are notification spam sites, websites that offer to download some sketchy software, or even outright phishing pages.

Promoting Through Hacked Legitimate Websites

The way these scams are promoted is also worth attention. They primarily target Google search results for queries like “Instagram hacking” or “Hack Instagram account”. But the search engine will never let the exact hacker page get to the top of results. What they do instead is inject corresponding keywords into files and directories of legit and well-established websites. That practice is also known as SEO poisoning, however, in this case, we see the modernized variant of one. This does not in fact require any hacking; the sites of choice should have the indexing of uploaded documents enabled, so the keyword spam will get into Google search index.

Once the user clicks on what looks like a result from a well-established site, they are getting redirected to one of the scam pages from the list above. Among the sites infested with such documents are mostly ones of government organizations. There are also several GitHub pages that Google may display, but all of them are taken down at the moment. Government sites, as usual, have much less snappy moderation, so I expect these poisoned results to hold up for some time. In the past, other fraudsters used the same exact practice to redirect people searching for Roblox money generator cheats to fake tech support pages.

Is Instagram Hacking Any Real?

In fairness, it is really possible to hack someone’s account, not only on Instagram, but on pretty much any website. Of course, I am not talking about dodgy sites I’ve mentioned above. With a fair amount of social engineering, OSINT, brute force or even phishing, one can get access to almost anything. All these methods, complemented with phishing and infostealer malware injection, form the basis for modern cyberattacks.

The ways to secure your account against such tricks are simple and are repeated in different places dozens of times. Set secure passwords, multi-factor authentication, login notifications to your devices, change passwords once in a 2-3 months, and chances of getting hacked will decrease by orders of magnitude.

How to Avoid Scam Instagram Account Hacking Pages?

To be sure about online services you have stumbled upon, regardless of their purpose, consider using Website Checker. This free service checks websites for safety through the selection of characteristics, and will clearly show whether you may or may not trust the site.

But to have an on-the-move online security, opt for using GridinSoft Anti-Malware, that has the same exact website checking system built into Online Security module. Such protection will stop any malicious sites from opening even before they can harm you.