Instagram has been a target by many bug finders, hackers and devs., in some couple of months we have seen diff bug findings in App by different people and here’s the new one for you all. Know How a 19-Year-old manages to Crash Instagram App on Android Smartphones with one Story and a Simple Bug finding. The effect of this method takes around 24hrs to fix everything back to normal. Check the report.
This bug is also related to Instagram stories, when you open the story to your App get crashed and you even won’t be able to see anyone’s story for 24hrs from top section. You can use Instagram rest of the feature but the story becomes dead for the next 24hrs even you reboot or clear the cache of the app. This is a kind of unique behaving trick that he found himself and made it to his profile. He’s just 19yrs old and made this from his end Crashing Instagram App for Android is seriously inspiring.
Sahil Explaining how he produced the Bug and got the idea of creating it?
Last night I was scrolling Instagram and suddenly I started exploring Instagram story features. I use to study about latest bugs and vulnerabilities. A few days back I read about a bug in Instagram i.e, a story containing UTF-8 characters which are not recognizable by devices (IOS and Android) in a quiz (Feature of the Instagram story) can crash the Instagram application.
Then I started exploring more about Instagram story features and there I found some limitations i.e, We cannot use two hashtags (Story Feature) in a single story, and also we cannot add more than one location tag and we cannot add more than four options in a quiz in a single story so by using this limitation I successfully reproduced this bug.
How a 19 Year old manages to Crash Instagram App on Android Smartphones with one Story- Process
After finding these limitations, I tried to bypass them. I fire up my burp suite and start capturing all the requests and doing some static code analysis after that I tried to bypass this limitation i.e. By overflowing the buffer.
After that, I made that story Public and started getting messages from my friends who see my stories regularly, they all said we are unable to see your story and if we try to see your story, my Instagram App Crashes.
Here is the request which is modified…
Here is the request after modifying…
How this Bug Effect and Work in Real Life?
Whenever anyone opens my story with any android device then his/her Instagram application crashes and after watching my story other people’s stories also get affected. After watching my story when someone opens another person’s story next to my story and before my story then also the Instagram application crash. You can check this on my Instagram account @actualsahil, under my memories section named as “let’s go…”.
After Finding this bug he has sent a short report on the Instagram Bug bounty program submitting the issue and process of how he found it. In recent times we have seen several such bugs on Instagram that were caught by the public and even some YouTubers after getting viral. Here the strange thing is it working that it’s even affecting other stories as well, actually the story section on top.
We hope Instagram find it and fix it soon but the rest of the thing is that it’s non-harmful in terms of hacking or such stuff, so if you want you can try but it takes 24hrs to fix everything after that.
We hope you got some info from this story and will share it on Social Media and friends, also do tag us on Twitter and Instagram Fresh_founder. This was edited by Amogh Gupta & Written by Sahil himself.
-Thanks for Reading.
