The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords.

A screenshot from a video released on Telegram claiming to show how Meta’s AI customer support bot could be tricked into resetting a target’s password.

On May 31, word began to spread on several Telegram instant message channels that Meta’s AI bot would happily add an email address to an existing account as part of the bot’s standard password reset flow.

A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target’s usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta’s AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset.

The Telegram account that posted the video also linked to screenshots of pro-Iran images, videos and messages that defaced the hacked Instagram accounts, saying hackers had used the exploit to hijack a number of valuable (read: short) Instagram account names that allegedly have a resale value of more than a half million dollars.

Meta has not responded to requests for comment on the video’s claims, but Meta’s Andy Stone said on Twitter/X that the issue had been resolved and that they were securing impacted accounts. The security blog thecybersecguru.com reports that Meta pushed an emergency patch over the weekend, and clarified that no back end database was breached.

“Instagram has notoriously poor human support infrastructure,” Cybersecguru wrote. “Recovering a locked account – especially a high-value one can take weeks of back-and-forth with an automated ticketing system. Meta’s solution was to deploy a conversational AI layer to handle common recovery workflows: relinking a lost email address, triggering a password reset, verifying account ownership. The assistant, presumably, was supposed to reduce friction for legitimate users stuck in account-access hell.”

Ian Goldin, a threat researcher at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said we’re entering unchartered security territory as more large online platforms start allowing AI chatbots to handle sensitive account recovery requests. Just like human customer support employees can be social engineered into providing unauthorized access to someone’s account, AI bots are equally eager to help and vulnerable to persuasion and trickery, he said.

“AI chatbots create interesting new attack surface, and we’re likely going to see a lot more of these kinds of attacks,” Goldin said.

Securing your various online accounts means taking full advantage of the most secure form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) offered (such as a passkey or security key). In this case, even using the least robust form of MFA that Instagram offers — a one-time code sent via SMS — likely would have blocked the exploit: The hackers who released the video on Telegram said their exploit failed to work against any accounts that had MFA enabled.

Hackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.

Microsoft said in a blog post today it identified more than 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices that were caught up in a stealthy but remarkably simple spying network built by a Russia-backed threat actor known as “Forest Blizzard.”

How targeted DNS requests were redirected at the router. Image: Black Lotus Labs.

Also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard is attributed to the military intelligence units within Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). APT 28 famously compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.

Researchers at Black Lotus Labs, a security division of the Internet backbone provider Lumen, found that at the peak of its activity in December 2025, Forest Blizzard’s surveillance dragnet ensnared more than 18,000 Internet routers that were mostly unsupported, end-of-life routers, or else far behind on security updates. A new report from Lumen says the hackers primarily targeted government agencies—including ministries of foreign affairs, law enforcement, and third-party email providers.

Black Lotus Security Engineer Ryan English said the GRU hackers did not need to install malware on the targeted routers, which were mainly older Mikrotik and TP-Link devices marketed to the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Instead, they used known vulnerabilities to modify the Domain Name System (DNS) settings of the routers to include DNS servers controlled by the hackers.

As the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) notes in a new advisory detailing how Russian cyber actors have been compromising routers, DNS is what allows individuals to reach websites by typing familiar addresses, instead of associated IP addresses. In a DNS hijacking attack, bad actors interfere with this process to covertly send users to malicious websites designed to steal login details or other sensitive information.

English said the routers attacked by Forest Blizzard were reconfigured to use DNS servers that pointed to a handful of virtual private servers controlled by the attackers. Importantly, the attackers could then propagate their malicious DNS settings to all users on the local network, and from that point forward intercept any OAuth authentication tokens transmitted by those users.

DNS hijacking through router compromise. Image: Microsoft.

Because those tokens are typically transmitted only after the user has successfully logged in and gone through multi-factor authentication, the attackers could gain direct access to victim accounts without ever having to phish each user’s credentials and/or one-time codes.

“Everyone is looking for some sophisticated malware to drop something on your mobile devices or something,” English said. “These guys didn’t use malware. They did this in an old-school, graybeard way that isn’t really sexy but it gets the job done.”

Microsoft refers to the Forest Blizzard activity as using DNS hijacking “to support post-compromise adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks on Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections against Microsoft Outlook on the web domains.” The software giant said while targeting SOHO devices isn’t a new tactic, this is the first time Microsoft has seen Forest Blizzard using “DNS hijacking at scale to support AiTM of TLS connections after exploiting edge devices.”

Black Lotus Labs engineer Danny Adamitis said it will be interesting to see how Forest Blizzard reacts to today’s flurry of attention to their espionage operation, noting that the group immediately switched up its tactics in response to a similar NCSC report (PDF) in August 2025. At the time, Forest Blizzard was using malware to control a far more targeted and smaller group of compromised routers. But Adamitis said the day after the NCSC report, the group quickly ditched the malware approach in favor of mass-altering the DNS settings on thousands of vulnerable routers.

“Before the last NCSC report came out they used this capability in very limited instances,” Adamitis told KrebsOnSecurity. “After the report was released they implemented the capability in a more systemic fashion and used it to target everything that was vulnerable.”

TP-Link was among the router makers facing a complete ban in the United States. But on March 23, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a much broader approach, announcing it would no longer certify consumer-grade Internet routers that are produced outside of the United States.

The FCC warned that foreign-made routers had become an untenable national security threat, and that poorly-secured routers present “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure and directly harm U.S. persons.”

Experts have countered that few new consumer-grade routers would be available for purchase under this new FCC policy (besides maybe Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet routers, which are produced in Texas). The FCC says router makers can apply for a special “conditional approval” from the Department of War or Department of Homeland Security, and that the new policy does not affect any previously-purchased consumer-grade routers.