Tag Archives: Instagram

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Messaging Gets Upgrade For Instagram Users

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire is chasing growth. It’s not hard to understand why. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with more than 2.4 billion users worldwide. The bigger you get, the harder it is to grow. That is exactly why Zuckerberg zeroed in on the three fastest platforms in his empire: Messaging, Stories, and Groups. By chasing the fastest growing elements, he can keep his empire expanding.

Instagram is a part of that empire and recently the company made a change, incorporating Direct Messaging (DMs) into the browser experience.

It’s a relatively small change, but its significance is not lost on Influencers and online marketers who rely heavily on Instagram to stay in touch with business partners around the world. Essentially, the change makes Instagram’s DMs just like any other online chat program, which makes communication easy, convenient and seamless.

Now that Instagram’s DMs are available in the browser, it’s just a matter of time before meta chat services that combine chat feeds from multiple sources incorporate Instagram DMs into the mix. That will enable you to access all your messages from a variety of sources from a single umbrella, which will streamline your communications further.

Messaging has of course been part of the internet experience since the earliest days of the web. Today’s apps are increasingly sophisticated, sleek and streamlined. Based on the growth trajectory Mark Zuckerberg made reference to, the trend toward increasing reliance on messaging across social media platforms only stands to grow further and take on ever more importance.

If your company uses Instagram DMs to keep far-flung employees in touch with each other, or to communicate with business partners, rejoice. The new changes will make your life even easier. Be advised though, that at present, the new functionality is in Beta, and is only available to a tiny fraction of Instagram’s user base. In the months ahead though, and pending successful testing, everyone will have access to it.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Instagram Adds AI To Warn You About Offensive Comments

Instagram has made a recent change you should be aware of. Any time you make a comment, you may get a popup warning that your comment may be “potentially offensive”.

That is, if the service’s AI-powered tools conclude that the warning is appropriate based on an analysis of other comments that have generated complaints.

Instagram isn’t taking a hard-nosed approach here. If you get such a notification, you’ll have the option to either edit it before posting or just post it as is.

In July 2019, the company introduced a similar tool for policing comments left on user posts, and this latest change builds on that toolset.

There’s a method to the company’s madness, and a broader purpose at work here. In October, Instagram added a “Restrict” feature that allows users to shadow ban bullies. Prior to that, it began rolling out AI bots that scanned content in an effort to proactively detect bullying in photos and captions, and other routines to filter offensive comments.

One thing that differentiates this latest feature from the others is that the company’s latest change is only available in “select countries” for now. The rest have been rolled out globally. Eventually that’s destined to change, but Instagram has not issued a statement for when that might happen.

Preventing cyberbullying doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Cyber bullying a real thing that leads to a tragic handful of deaths every year, and causes no end of pain and suffering to the targets of such behavior. So far, most companies haven’t been paying much more than lip service to doing something about it, so kudos to Instagram for taking this series of steps. While it remains to be seen how effective these efforts will be, the fact that the company is doing something is praiseworthy.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Instagram User Information May Have Been Available To Hackers

Do you have an Instagram account?

If so, be advised that David Stier (a business consultant and researcher for CNET) has recently discovered a flaw in Instagram’s website that exposed thousands of users’ email addresses and phone numbers for a period of more than a month.

Mr. Stier provided screen shots and other details to Instagram demonstrating that when the source code for some users’ profiles were displayed in a web browser, supposedly confidential information was plainly visible.

The exposed information ran the gamut and included the contact and personal information of individual adult users, some businesses, and an unknown number of minors.  The company responded promptly and issued a patch that corrected the problem not long after they were made aware, but at this point, the damage may have already been done.

From a user’s perspective, the best thing you can do is to change your Instagram password immediately and be on the alert that if a hacker made a copy of the information, you may be on the receiving end of phishing emails in a bid to collect even more information from you in the months ahead.

At this point, it is unknown whether any group or individual other than Mr. Stier found and made use of the exposed information. Instagram faced a similar issue several months ago, in which the company improperly protected a database containing the contact information of millions of their users, including several influencers and celebrities.  This database was initially uploaded and shared by a Mumbai-based marketing firm called Chtrbox, and the information it contained is unquestionably in the wild at this point.

Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, issued a brief statement to the effect that they were working with Chtrbox to understand exactly how they came to posses the data and how it became publicly available.  At this time, however, no additional information is available.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Social Media Is Big Business For Criminals

The rise of Social Media has been a game changer for businesses around the world, creating opportunities for customer engagement that were previously unimaginable.  Unfortunately, business owners aren’t the only ones reaping the benefits of Social Media.  The hackers of the world are in on the game too, and for them, Social Media represents a giant piggy bank that they’ve only begun tapping into.

Even now in the early stages of cybercriminal attacks on Social Media, the payoffs have been enormous. Social media attacks have been netting them a staggering $3.25 billion dollars a year.  As shocking as that figure might be, it’s important to remember that cybercrime on Social Media is a relatively new phenomenon.  Between 2013 and now, the number of cybercrime incidents involving social media has quadrupled.

The attacks take many forms, but one way or another, they come down to abusing the trust that is so essential for a functioning Social Media ecosystem.

Some attackers set up scam pages hawking illegal pharmaceuticals. Others gravitate toward cryptomining malware, while others still ply the Social Media waters intent on committing digital currency fraud or feigning a romantic connection to get money and personal information from their victims. Even if you’re one of the rare companies that doesn’t have a significant Social Media presence yet, that doesn’t mean you’re safe from harm.

Gregory Webb, the CEO of Bromium, recently spoke on the topic, outlining a danger that many business owners are simply unaware of.

“Social Media platforms have become near ubiquitous, and most corporate employees access Social Media sites at work, which exposes significant risk of attack to businesses, local governments as well as individuals.  Hackers are using social media as a Trojan horse, targeting employees to gain a convenient backdoor to the enterprise’s high value assets.”

In light of this, it’s probably well past time to sit down with your employees and make sure they’re aware of the risks they’re exposing you to when they access Social Media accounts at work.

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