Who is 1peprs, the hacker allegedly behind the takeover of Foodpanda and Young Lions Instagram accounts?

It’s been about a day since Foodpanda Singapore made an apology for the rude messages its customers received after its Instagram account got hacked over the weekend. As of writing, the food delivery app has managed to wrestle control of the account back from the bad actor, who managed to flush out past posts and thousands of followers. 

News of the hack surfaced yesterday, after a customer complained about receiving obscene (and decidedly un-corporate) DMs from @foodpandasg in response to her complaints about the company’s service on Instagram Stories. Foodpanda clarified that it didn’t send the messages and ascribed them to the hacker (or hackers) who took over its account. 

The intention of the hack, however, seemed more troll-y than malicious. Going by the name of “Osama” with a link to the Twitter handle @facrty, the hacker simply used the @foodpandasg account to showcase video-editing skills involving clips from TV shows like Gotham and The Umbrella Academy. A truly weird flex, which doesn’t okay his misdeeds. 

Who is 1peprs?

The thing is, Foodpanda is simply the latest Instagram account to be hacked by allegedly the same person (or people), which can be easily traced to an Instagram user who goes by @1peprs. It is believed that 1peprs was also behind the hacking of the Young Lions Football Club’s Instagram account earlier this month. 

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The modus operandi is similar. Switch the account name to “Osama”, purge all past posts and upload edited montages from TV shows. What the hacker did on the @yglions account as well was tag thousands of random Instagram users, somehow bypassing the maximum limit of 20 tags in a single post. The result, according to Mothership, was over 346,000 comments on the first video the hacker posted on @yglions. 

Even before hacking the two Singaporean accounts, 1peprs garnered quite a bit of notoriety on hacker forums for allegedly having (illegal) access to the Instagram backdoor. The prevailing belief is that 1peprs managed to bypass the platform’s security measures and circumvent the tagging limits. An automated bot is then used to find and tag users — including verified profiles — en masse, which in turn generates millions of views on the post.

The process proved effective enough to post 1.5 million comments on posts in a matter of hours. Take this post from last year, for example, where 1peprs accumulated over 6 million views and 5 million comments on a looped clip of a random girl lip-syncing. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uiu3XjBs9k[/embed]

“1peprs is a serial hacker. He’s like the Terminator of hackers when it comes to Instagram,” noted social-media marketer Andre De Souza in a YouTube video dedicated to figuring out who 1peprs is. 

“Not only is this guy able to manipulate Instagram and make his move around Instagram, he’s also able to access important information,” he remarked.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHNPfeLEcSQ[/embed]

Still, it’s unconfirmed whether 1peprs is genuinely the same party behind the hacks of @foodpandasg and @yglions. What’s even more unclear is whether the hacker will strike once again soon enough, with yet another verified Singapore-based Instagram profile getting hit. It's probably best that you change up your Instagram log-in passwords, especially if it's a simple one like "Password123". 

 

ilyas@asiaone.com