Last Sunday, I had a huge response to a series of porn posts on my Instagram account, all put there by your not so friendly hacker (I promise), who I’m assuming is based somewhere in Russia by their email address: i******k@m***.ru).

Some really interesting lessons learnt, firstly that a robust digital tribe / ecosystem is a wonderful thing in fighting online crime, within minutes I had lots of my mates letting me know (thanks to all of you) and some even congratulating me on finally putting up some interesting posts.

The other lesson is that in business and life, there is too often an inconsistency between what we say and what we do.

Instagram like lots of others digital marketplaces represent themselves as ways to easily connect and share information with others, but increasingly they are becoming the ones that are hardest to connect with.

After lots of research, by me and fellow geeks and nerds, we found that there was no easy way to contact Instagram and make them aware of the hack and reclaim my site.

There used to be a link, hidden away in their FAQ’s, that did this, but it was removed in late March 2017. There are Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Twitter contacts for Instagram, but both infer don’t really bother, we won’t reply for at least 7 days, if at all.

So score 1 for the hackers and 0 for site owners.

The solution was inelegant and for those making a living out of Instagram infuriating, it was to get my wife to go into her Instagram account and mark my site as inappropriate and ask for it to be taken down (which was done immediately).

I find it fascinating and somewhat unnerving that somebody else could have so easily closed down my account, but that the true owner has no way of doing it, or of getting their site back.

FYI  – the old way to let them know you had been hacked was to click the I’ve been hacked link (once you’ve found it), fill in the form, wait for a response – generally 48 hours +, and then send them a photo of you holding a sign of your account name and details, which they would then manually use to verify who you, after which they would reset your account how old school and so last century.

So if you’re looking for me on Instagram (and you’re not a hacker) you’ll find me fully clothed and very decent at “MorrisFuturist” and yes I get it’s a First World Problem and yes we need to make sure we change our passwords more often, etc etc, but really, in this day and age we can do better, we must do better!