Today was not an easy morning for Ellen DeGeneres. She woke to find that her Instagram account was briefly hacked according to the talk show host’s twitter and Yahoo Entertainment. A series of giveaways offering free Tesla cars, Mac Books, and more, were posted to the talk show host’s account last night. After seeing the posts, some of her followers became skeptical and warned her of the suspicious behavior. They were smart to flag the giveaways as untrustworthy because DeGeneres confirmed that her Instagram was in fact infected by malicious activity.
While Ellen joked about “password” not being the most secure password, it’s always a best practice to use strong passwords that differ from each of your other accounts to avoid easy break-ins from cybercriminals.
One of the central reasons hackers target social media accounts is to retrieve stored personal information. Once cybercriminals log in to an account, they have access to everything that has ever been shared with the platform, such as date of birth, email, hometown, and security questions. They then could potentially use this information to try to log in to other accounts or even steal the person’s identity, depending on the level of information they have access to.
Another motive for infecting a user’s social media account is to spread phishing scams or ellen degeneres instagram protect account
