Sophos Cloud Optix
As Pinterest’s popularity increases, so do the reports of spam on the fast-growing photo-sharing network.
A Naked Security reader reported to use today spam they had received via Pinterest, where the spammer had tagged their name in the message they had posted.
The Pinterest posts, which claimed to offer a wonder diet, used various images of scantily-clad models lazing about in their lingerie or swimsuits to entice unsuspecting users into clicking.
If you were one of the people who clicked on the bit.ly link, however, you might find yourself redirected (via a dental website that really shouldn’t be allowing anyone to redirect traffic to a third party site) to a bogus news page, promoting alleged diet products.
The good news is that Pinterest is now blocking the links..
..but why haven’t they also closed down the profile of the spammer, who has “pinned” hundreds of other similar posts?
My guess is that it won’t be long before the spammer is posting links which aren’t being blocked by Pinterest, and users will have yet more spam of which to be wary.
Traditional email spam may have reduced somewhat in the last year or so, but what we are seeing is a rise in spam exploiting social networks. And relatively young websites like Pinterest are still finding their feet when it comes to securing their users.
Is it any wonder that Pinterest spammers claim they can earn $1000 per day?
(By the way, you can follow Naked Security on Pinterest if you like).
Yup! I got one of those yesterday. I am still learning about Pinterest and couldn't find an easy way to report the page.
Why don't you send this info to Pinterest?
Kris, visit the single-pin page for that pin (not the whole board, but the individual pin) and in the margin it says "report this pin." Click there and you can choose "spam" or "other." The latter selection gives you an opportunity to write something, in case that is necessary in your report. Hope this helps. I'd love to see pinterest ban all bit.ly links or *something* to stop this mess that has sprung up with people pinning entire accounts full of nothing but crap.
Pinterest does NOT make it easy to report spammers. It took some digging for me to find the link when I started getting more of these kinds of messages back in March.
For reference: http://support.pinterest.com/anonymous_requests/n…
I would like to see a "flag this as spam" type option like some other networks have adopted.
once I saw the News Channel 8 my mind told me Scam and well I was right its one its so annoying with theses scams appearing but it seems that the moderators behind these sites are no talking action against them which is a good thing
I agree with the above comments – luckily I didn't bother opening the link as diets make me hungry.
Hmmmm… "Milton Keynes" … "health-concious American" … When did they move Buckinghamshire to the US?