Comedienne Anne Kansiime
Ugandan Comedienne Anne Kansiime is the latest victim of Instagram hacking, after all her information including followers, the people she follows and her photographs were deleted from the social media platform over the weekend.
In a video on her YouTube Channel on Sunday, Kansiime said she learnt that her account was hacked, when a friend called to tell her that she had failed to tag her in a photo.
“I checked my Instagram account, only to find that I have zero followers and I am following zero people. The profile photo was also gone. Who steals and even steals the profile picture?” she lamented.
“Hackers you are special. Aren’t you the guys that used to copy in exams and even end up copying your friends’ names? We know you came to steal kill and destroy, but at least leave me my pictures,” she added.
The account had garnered over 250,000 followers.
Kansiime suspects that one of the people on her media team could have caused the incident, as she had earlier on received several emails from people asking her to verify her account.
“Someone sent me an email about verifying the Instagram account. It almost looked genuine. It was from intagramverifiedticks@gmail.com.”
Questioning her faith
Kansiime in the YouTube Video further mentioned that the incident pushed her to question her faith.
“I was so scared, my palms were shaking, I was sweating. It is a big deal for me to lose something like that.
Losing my Instagram account made me question how much power we give to some of the things that we do in this life of ours.
I started to think how I have lost bigger things. People have died, I have been sick, I have been worried for my health, but I was never this afraid. How can I panic like this, because of social media?
How accounts get hacked
Sahil Uppal, a Cyber Security expert on Qoura says celebrities’, or anyone else’s accounts are majorly hacked using Phishing techniques.
Phishing is a technique in which the hacker sends a malicious link to the person whose account he wants to hack, in the hope that the person will click on that link, open the corresponding webpage, and enter his/her login credentials over there, which would then be relayed to the hacker.
The malicious links are designed in a manner that makes in difficult for the victim to doubt the genuinity of the link. Also, the corresponding webpage is generally designed to be a duplicate of the site that the hacker is trying to impersonate.
“It is advisable to not open any links directly via email. If you get an email that “your friend” has posted on Facebook, take the effort to directly go the Facebook login page and check out the post after logging in, rather than clicking on the link in the email directly,” he says.
Kansiime is now calling on people to follow her on her new Instagram account @Kansiimeanne256. By Monday Morning, she had garnered 5021 followers, and followed back 474 people.
