San Francisco: Social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter this week took measures to target users involved in reselling hijacked user accounts across their platforms, cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reported.
The users who have now been banned have played a major role in enabling the trade and resale of highly sought-after usernames.
According to KrebsOnSecurity's report on Thursday, hundreds of accounts have now been seized as a result of the action by the social media platforms.
OGUsers is the forum that facilitates selling access to hijacked online accounts.
This community particularly gives priority to short usernames which can be "resold for thousands of dollars", the report said.
According to The Verge, Instagram has confirmed that that it has disabled hundreds of accounts that were stolen as part of online hacking operations that had aimed to gain access to and sell coveted usernames.
"Today, we're removing hundreds of accounts connected to members of the OGUsers forum. They harass, extort and cause harm to the Instagram community, and we will continue to do all we can to make it difficult for them to profit from Instagram usernames," a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying by The Verge.
The report comes after Instagram released a new feature that allows people recover deleted posts earlier this week, in the event a hacker takes control of their account and removes posts.