I mean, probably it was hacked to contain “More Butts,” since there were probably already some butts on the site already, but still, over the last couple of days the incidences of butts on the site for some users became alarmingly high.
Turns out it was a rash of hacked accounts. TechCrunch reached out to Pinterest, and received this response:
Our systems were alerted to some incidents of spam yesterday evening. These reports did not come in at a large scale. We began working on cleaning up and placing the accounts in safe mode immediately. The accounts have since been secured. As a precaution, Pinners should use unique and strong passwords, and can get more information in our Help Center.
Hackers appeared to be filling folks’ feeds with miracle weight loss spam, which, as these things often do, included a lot of before and after pictures of butts. When clicked on, the pictures might not even link to anything relevant to the image, but to a third party site of whatever the spammer is looking to direct clicks to. So if you saw a lot in your feeds, you might follow some folks who weren’t as careful with their passwords as they should be. I say that as I acknowledge that I myself am incredibly lazy about password security, so, no shame, just… butts.
With the growth of Pinterest’s popularity, it’s become more of an appealing target to spammers and scammers, and even the Better Business Bureau has taken notice, issuing a number of tips to keep your account, and your computer, safe. If you found your Pinterest account inundated with butts this week, we’re glad we could bring the explanation to you.
If you didn’t notice that your Pinterest account had been inundated with butts, because it’s already usually full of butts, we’d like to high five you.
(via Geekosystem.)
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Published: Mar 28, 2014 02:01 pm