Quartz, an internet based news publishing website, recently reported news about an Instagram privacy weakness that lets users access privately tagged photos. Instagram however was quick to react on the news and has immediately released a patch to fix the problem before more problems could arise.
The flaw was reported by Quartz last week and Instagram patched the problem by Friday. The flaw was quickly fixed in order to prevent malicious users from taking advantage. Instagram has already apologized and released a statement saying that they will intensify their security protocols in order to avoid future problems like this to arise.
Quartz explained that the flaw will allow users to access photo even if it has been tagged as private. The problem comes when a user uploads a photo using a public account and even if they had changed their account status to private, the photos uploaded when the account was public will still be available for the public domain to access. Additional report states that this problem is only present in desktop or PC users, Instagram's app for iOS and Android were not affected of the flaw.
So far, this is one of Instagram's biggest privacy breaches and the company owes it big time to Quartz for identifying the problem before hackers and other malicious groups took advantage of it.
Right now, Instagram, along with its parent company Facebook has the biggest number of user in terms of monthly use. Together they have more than two billion active users using their websites monthly. With this figure, the two social network giants are targeted by hackers for mining personal information on a specific person or group, thus Facebook and Instagram has been subject to several hacking and security attacks in the past.
Instagram has already stated that they will be adding more security and privacy protocols to their website in order to protect their user's personal information.
