Twitter used to be a common place where people and brands often found their accounts hacked – but it now looks like the little rascals are turning their attention to Pinterest.
The poor folk at UrbanAdventures have admitted that the company’s Pinterest profile was attacked last week – and looking at its main page on the site it could hard to see where on first inspection.
It turns out that tucked away at the foot of its board was a new album, not created by the UA team, full of scantily clad ladies in various poses.
Such attacks are increasing, it would appear judging by the chatter on Twitter recently.
But, bizarrely, rather than sending out visitors to some dodgy porn site, UA’s hackers linked the pictures off to a Portuguese YouTube about UFOs.
The clip, incidentally, has had some 800,000 views. So, as general manager Tony Carne says, “their [hackers] strategy is obviously working if getting a big view count is the objective”.
Given the subtlety in which the content has been added, Carne adds: “Probably worth everyone having a look at their account to make sure all is in order.”
Unless UFOs and semi-naked ladies are your thing, of course.
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About Kevin May
Sounds more like an employee wanted to do a marketing experiment. From the tweets regarding it, I tend to think people’s pinterest boards that got hacked first got their twitter accounts hacked and had enabled login access from twitter.
Thanks for those insights Heather. Just for the record one 2 people have access to Urban Adventures Pinterest account. Myself and our digital manager who was holidays when it occurred. Our core audience is 70% female (and our staff 80% female) so to suggest a marketing experiment that alienates a large portion of the target audience is a little absurd.
Tony, thank you for that information, You guys are doing such a great job on Pinterest, I thought you must have had a whole gang of employees posting on it. my apologies for the assumption!
I hope they track down the issue, I talked with several other people today who had their accounts hacked and they had authorized twitter and facebook access. Whether they are the original culprits (bring hacked) and granting them access to Pinterest remains to be seen. I would hate to see some other security flaw in it with so many people using it.
Best of luck to you!