Russian Malware Link Found Hidden in Comment to Britney Spears' Instagram

Security researchers discovered what appeared to be a harmless comment left on an Instagram picture posted by Britney Spears which, in fact, instructed Russian malware how to get in touch with its controllers. 

According to ESET Security, among the 7,000 comments written to Spears' photo was hidden a message that was more than met the eyes. The malware was actually hidden in a Firefox browser extension that was posing as a security feature. Instead, the extension would search for hidden links through the Instagram post in order to know how to connect back to the control server. 

The comment has since been deleted, but it was actually a web address that was quite complicated to decipher. 

The malware was programmed to go through all the comments on the Instagram photo and compute a hash, or a number, for each of them, while looking for ...