Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#111

Post by Terr_ » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #99

ChuckMcM wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read that as "worked as written" and "we disclaim any consequential or incidental damages and do not warrant this software." I continue to believe we could fix a lot of things in the US if we updated the UCC[1] to disallow 'disclaiming liability on software used in a product.' [1] Universal Commercial Code -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc

I've always wanted to expose myself to unlimited legal liability by distributing open source software.

That seems like a false-dichotomy between two extremes when there's all sorts of space in the middle... It's also assuming developer-to-developer tools would have the same rules and exposure as in service-to-consumer.

If I sell a physical motor (let alone plans for one) I'll have some liability for things like it Not Exploding. If someone buys a dozen of those motors to assemble a tragically unsafe "rollercoaster" of their own design and construction, I'm almost certainly not responsible for any terrifying decapitations.

In other words, most of the world already does not rely on the issuance of "Get Out Of Infinite Liability Free" cards.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#112

Post by Lionga » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

johnyzee wrote: post #81

"Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised. [...] The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person's entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages, and account activity [...] the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until th…

One can only hope EU gives them a GDPR fine very close to the limit of 4% of global turnover. But when EU is actually need to protect customer I think they will fail.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#113

Post by Lionga » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

Just AI Slop doing AI Slop things

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#114

Post by dakolli » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

dwa3592 wrote: post #52

I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.

What are their alternatives? I'm assuming that most of the 22k people with large audiences that need a large platform to reach them. Meta unfortunately, is the only platform that allows people to reach across many demographics. Its the people that follow the 22k accounts that are important, and they are unaffected by this and thus aren't leaving meta (and 99% won't even know this happened or care).

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#115

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

dwa3592 wrote: post #52

I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.

Somehow this company still earns over a billion dollars a week in net profits, which I find puzzling.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#116

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

herpdyderp wrote: post #76

dwa3592 wrote: post #52

I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.

Realistically, how will this affect Meta at all? Some people are pissed, nobody else cares, business as usual.

Well, these hacks targeted large influencer accounts. It could have more severe impact than 20k randomly selected accounts.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#117

Post by dakolli » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #77

Havoc wrote: post #35

>AI-assisted account recovery system oh no...Meta what are you doing

Account recovery is by far the #1 kind of ticket any service will get. Either because people forget their credentials, lose their credentials, get hacked or get impersonated - and that's just the legitimate tickets, on top of that come illegitimate tickets from everyday script kiddies over ransom extortioners (i.e. the people that aim to steal "valuable" handles) to nation-state actors that, say, want to get access t…

You don't need an llm or a human to handle 99% of account recovery tickets. They're just shoving LLMs into everything because decision makers have llm psychosis because openclaw modified their calendar a few times and now think they live in star trek.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#118

Post by Chu4eeno » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

dmoose wrote: post #23

nico wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like the justifications Claude and ChatGPT give when confronted about something they did wrong, or when asked to provide a customer support response about software issues

I've lost track of the number of times Claude has basically said "it was like that when i got here" in the face of a clearly bogus choice and easily disproved explanation.

You need to hit the retry/regenerate button more, it's there for a reason.

While the "stochastic parrots" thing is a bit overblown, IME most LLMs tend to surprisingly different responses even without changing the context, especially if they're hallucinating or doing something "wrong".

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#119

Post by az226 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

Cyan488 wrote: post #3

> "The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account," said Meta in its breach notice. I'm not sure "worked properly" and "as intended" accurately describe this situation.

I'm sure. It was not working properly nor as intended.

Re: Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

#120

Post by asveikau » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #114

dwa3592 wrote: post #52

I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.

What are their alternatives? I'm assuming that most of the 22k people with large audiences that need a large platform to reach them. Meta unfortunately, is the only platform that allows people to reach across many demographics. Its the people that follow the 22k accounts that are important, and they are unaffected by this and thus aren't leaving meta (and 99% won't even know this happened or care).

Depends on the use case, but TikTok is an alternative for many of them, I would say it generally feels more like the place where interesting things are happening vs. meta properties.