My Instagram account was hacked

Someone decided it would be a good idea to hack my Instagram account and I discovered this gross invasion of my privacy this lunchtime.

Strangely whoever it was (thanks by the way - putting it right took me almost 90 seconds that I won't ever get back) managed to log into my account, had me follow 282 new accounts and didn't bother to change the password, post any images or do anything other than annoy.

Deleting the people the hacker followed there was an interesting pattern. Firstly they were all real accounts of real people. Many were Middle Eastern and in Arabic (around 20%) the rest were US and UK account by and large. They all had one thing in common a decent chunk of existing followers - no one had less than 30,000 followers to their own account and most were between 50 and 100K. The largest I found had just over 300,000 followers.

I'm guessing here but I wonder if some less than scrupulous organisation is selling Instagrammers the possibility of increasing their following and is using multiple hacked accounts to provide this 'service'.

Have strengthen my password and authentication on Instagram and shouldn't happen again but worth watching out for.