Instagram denies breach amid claims of 17 million account data leak

A dataset purportedly containing personal details for roughly 17 million Instagram accounts was posted on hacking forums; Meta says there was no new breach and fixed a bug that allowed mass password-reset requests. The leaked records reportedly include phone numbers, emails, names, and addresses (no passwords), raising the risk of targeted phishing, smishing, and social engineering even if the data may be compiled from older scraping incidents.