Some of the employees were security officers working for a subcontractor but had access to an internal company tool.
The fault was open, and the pirates rushed into it. the Wall Street Journal reveals that Meta – parent company of Facebook and Instagram – fired more than “two dozen employees and contractors last year”, facing corruption allegations. Clearly, these employees would accept bribes of several thousand dollars to allow hackers to take over Facebook or Instagram accounts.
For an employee of the group, nothing could be simpler. If the company doesn’t have customer service to help with account recovery, they have an in-house tool that makes it easy to recover a lost password or reactivate a suspended account.
Called “Oops” for “Online Operations,” this service is usually the last step in achieving this, after failing to use automated tools. In theory it is intended for celebrities, Meta partners or people around Mark Zuckerberg. Confidential, it is however increasingly used: from 22,000 times in 2017 to 50,000 times in 2020.
Parallel business
Concretely, a Meta employee or even a subcontractor transmits an email address of an account being recovered to a support team who is responsible for rebooting and transmitting a new password. Nothing complicated.
A security flaw within Meta that has seen the development of a parallel activity. Against several thousand dollars, an entrepreneur specialized in the reactivation of suspended accounts, thanks to internal help.
“When you delete the Instagram account of someone who spent years creating it, you take away all means of generating income,” Nick McCandless explains to the Wall Street Journal.
A maneuver that however contravenes the conditions of use of the social network, recalls Meta. But “Oops” can mostly be used by pirates. A former security guard for a Meta subcontractor is accused of helping “third parties fraudulently take over Instagram accounts” even after he was fired in 2021.
The man, for his part, claims to have only “helped people recover their accounts”. A colleague of his was also fired after she received thousands of dollars in bitcoin to reset her account.
