Last night Premier League footballer Romelu Lukaku became the latest high-profile victim of social media hacking when his official Instagram account was accessed and changed to 'Billionaire Boy's Club', according to a report by The Sun.
The breach occurred whilst the Belgian striker was taking part in Wayne Rooney’s testimonial match between Manchester United and Everton at Old Trafford, which finished goalless. Three pictures were posted from the altered version of Lukaku’s verified account; one was of a set of keys to several luxury cars, one from the deck of a yacht and a behind shot of a bikini-clad woman sitting by a swimming pool.
Lukaku, who has netted 45 times since making his loan move to Goodison Park permanent two years ago, has already been in the headlines in recent weeks as question marks still remain over his future, with Chelsea apparently keen on resigning their former hitman.
His younger brother, Jordan, was quick to take to social media himself to vent his anger at the hack.
He wrote: “This guy hacked my brother, it was originally my brother’s page but it got hacked and then out of nowhere this certified page popped up with the same followers and the same number of followers.”
Speaking to Infosecurity Chris Boyd, malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, said that social media accounts can be ‘gold-dust’ to scammers, as one single compromise of a popular account can mean spamlinks sent out to hundreds of thousands of potential victims.
“This has been the case from the days of Myspace right up to the present day, and nothing has changed where this is concerned. The primary difference is the sheer weight of social network users now versus five or more years ago.”
However, most accounts can be secured with the aid of two factor authentication, alongside other tools to reduce the possibility of spam and harassment, he explained.
“Additionally, many services look for – and flag – suspicious activity in a variety of ways, so there's no reason to not do our part and lock our accounts down properly. The biggest threat to social media accounts is social engineering, so we need to be careful around what we click or install as service specific applications."