Spammers target Pinterest, take over boards

There’s no doubting Pinterest’s popularity — it flew past the 10-million unique visitors a month mark in near record time. There’s also no doubting it’s a great referer of traffic — better even than Twitter. But is it about to become a haven for spammers?

According to online news site GigaOm “some kind of spam-exploit injected JavaScript code” started replacing photos on the highly visual social network with ads for US-based retail outlet Best Buy.

Most social network users will be familiar with a variety of spam attacks. These can be anything from someone’s Facebook account being taken over and claiming that they’ve found out who’s been viewing their profile most to people’s Twitter accounts being hacked before spewing out a series of weight-loss ads.

Social networking spammers frequently make use of news and current events to make clicking on their embedded links more enticing. One recent example of this surrounded the death of pop-star Whitney Houston.

According to the latest Symantec Intelligence report, one popular method involved circulating links to fake videos:

Rather than a video being presented to them, the user would be asked to upgrade some software in order to view the video, but the software being installed could potentially lead to a malware infection

The Pinterest spam issue appears to have since been resolved. It will be interesting, however, to see whether or not the up-and-coming social network can manage spam levels as its user numbers increase.

It’s not an easy task. You can utilise your user base, asking them to report spam accounts. This is, however, a far from effective solution as spammers have a nasty habit of hopping from one email address and account to the next.