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[NSFW] ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie, hackers take Pinterest on a joyride’

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NSFWish Miscreants have made an ass out of users of bewildering photo-sharing website Pinterest – by hijacking their accounts to flood the boards with butt pics.

The cheeky spammers gained control of the profile pages by tricking victims into clicking on “Pin This” widgets on websites or running dodgy apps, all of which had malicious code hidden inside. The rump snaps were then pasted all over users’ image boards to tout dubious weight-loss pills. Suffice to say, Pinteresters Pinners were pretty bummed out by the vandalism.

So it appears diet-pill spammers have moved on from joyriding the Twitter profiles of celebrities to the twee world of cats and cupcakes – it’s an endorsement, of sorts, for Pinterest though not one the social network is likely to welcome.

In a statement this morning, US West Coast time, the website’s team told The Reg its techies have got to the bottom of the problem, and are in the process of cleaning up the mess:

Our systems were alerted to some incidents of spam yesterday evening. These reports did not come in at a large scale, and we began working on cleaning up and placing the accounts in safe mode immediately. The accounts have since been secured.

We work hard to protect the security of Pinners. As part of that effort, when we see that compromised email credentials are being used in an attempt to gain access to Pinterest accounts, we immediately notify the at-risk Pinner and remind them to reset their password. The best precaution is to use a strong and unique password that is not used on other sites.

This graffiti, brought to our attention by TechCrunch, is not the first of its kind to hit the up-and-coming social network: earlier this month the US Better Business Bureau put out an alert urging users to not click on dodgy looking “pins” – the term Pinterest uses for a digital scrapbook images. Tips from Pinterest on account security can be found here. ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/28/pinterest_hack/

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