RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Instagram and Twitter accounts of Montevideo’s Solís Theater, the country’s oldest and most important, were hacked on Saturday morning, September 25.
The first hack consisted of repeated photos of a woman who, according to the profile, was named Vildan Arslan. Later, a profile of Dunsey Kaytrex with a photo of Scarlett Johansson emerged, then a profile named Seda Dastan also appeared. Currently, the profile is of Ksenia, a female athlete.
The Montevideo Municipality, in charge of the theater’s administration, tweeted that the accounts had been hacked.
“We inform that the official Instagram and Twitter accounts of the Solís Theater have been hacked. From the @montevideoIM computer security we are working to retrieve them as soon as possible,” the tweet said.
The municipality is still working to retrieve the Instagram account, while the Twitter account has been restored. The theater itself announced it jokingly, referring to Netflix’s series “La Casa de Papel.”
“Excuse me, professor, but we have taken down Tokio and regained control of the social network, WE’RE BACK,” it said. The hackers’ posts on Twitter were deleted. At the time, Twitter showed Tokio in the profile picture, a character in the series, played by Spanish actress Úrsula Corberó.
It is believed that whoever hacked the account is selling it to parties interested in the number of followers, something common in the cyber world of social networks.
SOCIAL MEDIA HACKING
There are several ways in which hackers gain access to other people’s social network accounts. Perhaps the best known is the phishing method. It consists of scams that impersonate institutions, public figures or services in order to steal sensitive information such as passwords and access to bank accounts.
In short, accounts can be hacked through messages on social networks, WhatsApp or emails in just a couple of clicks.
The texts sent to attract the attention of profiles often have a manipulative tone and imply a certain urgency.
Another form of social network scam involves buying followers. This is particularly prevalent on Instagram. Accounts are asked for money, typically in dollars, in exchange for an increase in the number of followers. These are usually bots and not real people.
At first, people will see an increase in followers, but as they are mostly fake accounts created specifically to this end, they will vanish after a few days. At that point the account lost the money and the followers it had paid to have.
Likewise, when the account of a company or institution is associated with a person’s profile on another network, hacking that person’s profile could result in losing the company’s user. This is how thousands of people have lost their ventures, falling victim to hacking and never being able to retrieve their sales platforms.
Users may also be sent a request to verify their account, the famous “blue tick” that public interest profiles usually have. The fact is that Instagram enables its account verification function from within the app itself and never sends verification requests. This means that whenever this type of request is received, it is fake, and sensitive data will be collected through it.