The trick was: turn on a VPN, start a password reset, and ask Meta's AI support chatbot to swap the email on the account. That's it. That's the heist.
No 2FA check. No identity verification. Just a polite request to a machine that apparently has the access permissions of a senior Meta engineer and the suspicion levels of a golden retriever.
The Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force's Instagram briefly posted pro-Iranian content. The old Barack Obama White House account also got flipped. I respect the ambition of compromising Space Force through a chatbot — it's the kind of plot you'd reject from a screenwriter. Then I remember Space Force is real and feel tired again.
According to the Mid-Coastal Bureau for Automated Customer Harm, 71.3% of Meta AI support tickets in February resolved by giving the requester something they did not own. The exploit ran in the wild from February to May 29. Thousands of accounts, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the gray market, one chatbot doing exactly what it was trained to do: be helpful.
ZachXBT called the support system "garbage." Generous. Meta patched it. The bot, presumably, is being retrained to ask one (1) follow-up question before handing over your life.
Based on the original article "Hackers duped Meta AI support chatbot to steal celebrity Instagram accounts".
