A CTA train in Chicago, Illinois continues onward through “The Loop”.
This past week I woke up one morning to find my Instagram feed was hacked. After a series of slow-moving correspondence with Facebook and Instagram I was able to reacquire my account, but it took some patience and a bit of frustration along the way.
I went to bed about midnight on Tuesday after posting a photo, and woke up the next morning to a weird message from Instagram telling me something along the lines of I had been logged out of my account, perhaps because my account no longer existed.
Wait, what?
Generally, I cross-post a lot of items on social media. I may post a variation of the same image on Facebook and Twitter, but then post the link to the picture on Instagram. By doing this, once I discovered something was amiss with my Instagram account, I went to Twitter to follow the link to my Instagram … except it was no longer “my” Instagram. My name of @kjkettnerphoto had been replaced by another name, and my profile picture had changed from me to the actor Nicholas Cage. All of my previous posts, hashtags, followers, were all still there, but the account had a new name.
Immediately I tried logging in using my previous info, but it was all a lost cause. It’s difficult to log into an account that no longer exists. On that note, it was also difficult to ask for help. Everything on Instagram I found was targeted for “I can’t remember the password for my account.” Well, what do you do when your account no longer exists?
After taking a few minutes to search the web, I found a page on Instagram that was more of what I was looking for. I searched something like “my Instagram was hacked” and found a link to a page that I could start the recovery process. One of the first things requested was a picture of me, holding a code on a hand-written piece of paper. The biggest problem is I’m not in any of my Instagram pictures. How is a picture of me going to help me get my account back? My dog, however, is in a few images so I grabbed her to include.
The two of us posed for a picture, following Instagram‘s directions, and I sent the picture in. And waited.
Having just over 1200 followers, I couldn’t imagine why someone would hack my account. It took a bit to wrap my head around the fact that I lost my account, but again, I couldn’t figure out why; especially since it now lay dormant with no changes (except the username and profile picture). What do I do if I can’t get it back? Start over? What happens if I get the same or more followers and lose it again? I post to Instagram for fun, and this certainly took the fun out of it.
Several hours after sending in the picture, I received a response from Facebook asking for a basic explanation of what happened. I replied immediately, and waited several more hours for a reply. In all, it took about four days to get my account back.
Instagram was, albeit slower then I would have liked, very helpful in resolving the issue. I completely understand they want to confirm they aren’t helping me hack an account, but I was annoyed that no one could look at the general history and say “Hey, this guy had an account for six years and had no issues, then one day his entire account is changed to a Russian email address and now he’s making noise.”
When I finally got the link to reset my account, I turned on Two-Factor Authenticfication, came up with a much, much stronger password and breathed a sigh of relief. Also, I grabbed the dog and took a picture with her, just as a “throw away” post on Instagram so if this happens again there is a much better picture of me to use in resolving the issue.
Then I changed all my other passwords.
0818. (9439)
