Meta's AI support chatbot became a seven-week password-reset backdoor. 20,225+ Instagram accounts hijacked.

Meta confirmed a flaw in its AI-assisted account-recovery chatbot let attackers hijack at least 20,225 accounts between April 17 and early June. Ask the bot to change an account's email, and it fired a password-reset link to an unverified address. Meta only noticed on May 31 after high-profile takeovers including a Space Force official and Sephora. This is the cleanest cautionary tale of the year. Never wire an LLM agent to a privileged action like account recovery without a separate, hard identity-verification path. Agent convenience created a bypass that ran for seven weeks before anyone caught it.