Instagram phishing problems are becoming an increasingly serious issue for all users of this platform, especially for Instagram business accounts. This is because hackers are constantly ‘improving their game’ and their methods of deceiving unwitting users are growing increasingly sophisticated day by day.
What Is an Instagram Phishing Website?
The most well-known and most used method of Instagram phishing comes from using fake login pages contained in phishing emails. Hackers attempt to get users to click on their fake links by cowing the users with supposed ‘warnings’ of committing an intellectual property violation. The Instagram spam email from the hacker states that within 24 hours of the email being sent, it is necessary to directly complain about a violation of the intellectual property infringement policy or delete the post. This method of intimidation leads users to fill out their information without checking the authenticity of the corresponding email; in their bid to prove that they haven’t committed and supposed copyright violation. This leads them to lose access to their account.
Another well-known hack is to exploit profile verification badges, which are often given to high-profile accounts or verified business accounts. These blue badges are usually given to famous influencer accounts and business accounts. Hackers send fake authentication emails with phishing links, asking users to verify their accounts using the fake login page provided by saying that they are considering granting blue badges to them.
Determining Malicious Instagram Phishing Links
Here’s the method to determine whether a login page is real or a phishing scam using Criminal IP’s Asset Search (https://www.criminalip.io/asset) function, If you look at the title of Instagram’s real login page, we can see that the website page title includes the string “Login Instagram”.
The real Instagram Login page. The page title has “Login – Instagram” as its string
Hackers will certainly imitate the real login page to their best ability. As we can see below, searching with the “title:Login Instagram” query using the title filter in Asset Search, we can find results of servers hosting both the actual login page and imitation pages on the results page.
There’s a total of 87 search results found from this query. Among these numbers include forged login phishing pages created by malicious hackers.
Search results of the query “title:Login Instagram” reveals a total of 87 server results.
Accessing one of these listed servers redirected to an Instagram phishing site.
An example of a fake phishing login page used by hackers
Determining Whether an Instagram Email Is a Phishing Scam
[Criminal IP Search 101- A How to Guide on Identifying Instagram Phishing Scams]
It may be hard for you to notice whether you’ve been hacked or not until a hacker actually accesses your account. Furthermore, these kinds of malicious URLs may force desktops and mobile devices to download malware in order to steal more information stored on these devices.
In these cases, typing a URL and scanning information in Criminal IP Domain Search (https://www.criminalip.io/domain) can allow users to access domain information without accessing the webpage itself.
The image below shows the search results of an imitation domain of an Instagram login page. With this link containing a forged favicon and both IP address and domain owner names hidden by Cloudflare, it is pretty obvious that this is a malicious website. In addition, screenshots of these webpages provide us with the information we need to determine whether this is a real website or a phishing scam.
Results page of an Instagram phishing webpage, as shown on Criminal IP Domain Search
Results page of an Instagram phishing webpage, as shown on Criminal IP Domain Search
Therefore, it’s important to search all links, and not just Instagram login pages, from suspicious emails to DMs on Criminal IP Domain Search before clicking them.
For more information, refer to this article about using Domain Search to track down K-pop Deepfake webpages.
Source : Criminal IP (https://www.criminalip.io)
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