Pinterest Falls Victim to Spam Attacks

You cannot deny Pinterest‘s inclusion as a major social media player these days. The company cracked the top 30 in pageviews last week and now has over 100 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) in the U.S. alone.

Unfortunately, the features that make this site so popular with users also make it very susceptible to spam. On Facebook, you must friend someone in order for them to spam your newsfeed, and even then you know who it is coming from and you can decide to “defriend.” Pinterest, on the other hand, shows pin of people you are not following yet. While this may help you broaden your horizons, so to speak, it makes it difficult to tell where spam is coming from.

Especially when a spammers post items while pretending to be you, which is exactly what happened this past St. Patrick’s Day. It seems spammers are trying to take advantage of Pintest’s high customer referral rate to draw attention to their products.

GigaOm is reporting the appearance of “some kind of spam-exploit injected javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy.” The spam also included ads for Target, Starbucks, and Apple.

Some ads even had their “Edit” buttons disappear, making it impossible to delete.

Pinterest has since discovered the problem and implemented a fix, but I don’t think this is the last we have heard from Pinterest spam. Spammers always find a way…

Spammers may have already found another loop-hole. This was posted only an hour ago, long after Pinterest supposedly corrected the problem. It involves a weight-loss pill, not one of the known culprits during the St. Patty’s Day hack.