Incident Reported: May 27 2020

Australian Malware Attack June 2020: erth socialite Melissa Graham held to ransom after Instagram privacy breach

The wife of Keystart Home Loans chief executive Paul had her Instagram account hacked and her profile along with its 15,000 followers vanished.

Source: Incident: Perth socialite Melissa Graham held to ransom after Instagram privacy breach | The West Australian
More reports from: The West Australian.

She first received a generic email from the social media site, confirming she had changed her email address and after logging in to investigate, she discovered her account had disappeared. Minutes later she was held to ransom by someone she had never met.

“Your Instagram page has been blocked. For unblocking account send message to our email. We will waiting for an answer three hours. If you don’t write to us, your account will be cleared from all photos and we sell it, or account will be deleted,” the email read.

“I just saw 4.5 years of work blow up in 30 seconds,” Ms Graham said. “I just panicked as unfortunately my passwords tended to be the same for everything from bank accounts to Instagram, Facebook, Net-A-Porter.”