Hackers breached Instagram’s defenses last month due to an artificial intelligence chatbot vulnerability, The New York Times reported Tuesday (June 9).
In all, 34,000 accounts on the Meta-owned social media site were affected, according to the report, which cited internal documents. Of those, 20,000 were breached, giving the hackers access to personal data.
A hacking group discovered a bug last month in a Meta customer service tool that allowed anyone to employ an AI-powered chatbot to reset Instagram account passwords, the report said. The hacker simply had to ask the bot to change the password.
Among the affected accounts were those of home security company SimpliSafe and a senior Space Force official, per the report. In the latter case, hackers started posting messages comparing the United States’ conflict in Iran to the Vietnam War.
Meta said it could not determine what information had been stolen or viewed by the hackers but that it fixed the flaw, according to the report.
“Some of our internal back-end checks failed in this instance, but it wasn’t due to the AI agent itself, and we’ve addressed the underlying cause,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, per the report, adding that the company is notifying regulators and people involved.
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The incident is the latest in a series of AI-related “hiccups” for Meta as it centers itself around the tech, the report said. The company is integrating AI into its platforms, which also include Facebook and WhatsApp, while also spending billions of dollars to compete with AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the tech giant’s future will hinge on it quickly pivoting to become an AI-first company. This transition has not gone smoothly, according to the report. Employees chafed at a program that tracked their computer activity for AI training. Meta has also laid off thousands of workers as it ups its focus on AI.
This month, David Plotinsky, partner at Morgan Lewis, discussed the technology’s impact on national security with Competition Policy International, a PYMNTS company.
“There’s going to need to be, not just in the foreign investment space, but across the board, new ways of thinking about AI,” Plotinsky said.
“We need to think about, for example, how things like AI will increase the ability of foreign adversaries to take even public data and leverage it to try to use social media and other platforms to influence public opinion,” he added.
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