Weird Instagram Bot Traces

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 03:07:00 GMT

So far this month I’ve received a couple hundred email messages from Instagram notifying me that their Terms of Use have been updated. They’re legitimate emails; it looks like someone signed up hundreds of Instagram accounts using randomized innocence.com email addresses. Since I moved my mail to Fastmail, I’m now seeing them all. I poked around a couple of the accounts (hi, kurt.clemons78446!) and the ones I spot checked have all been deleted.

I imagine someone used innocence.com as a domain for non-existent email addresses, and these either date back to before Instagram added a confirmation step (and were later removed for spamming) or they just never confirmed the accounts. You’d think that deleted accounts would be removed from whatever list of email addresses Facebook is using to generate these emails. Unconfirmed accounts… I guess those should still see the Terms of Use changes.

Good times. Finally added a filtering rule for the emails, anyhow.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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bryant

Weird Instagram Bot Traces