Scumbag Pinterest Tactic - How Did They Do This?

I adore pinterest and have more boards and pins than a normal person should! Double check your settings and make sure your boards are all set so that you are the only person who can pin to them -- that may be the problem

Ah just now looked at my "Activity" and it shows I "Liked" someone's pin 14 hours ago. Problem is, I wasn't on Pinterest 14 hours ago. I just Unliked them all and left a note about it. Guess I'll just change my password?

Hello Tiff,

Yes, changing your password is the best thing you can do for now while you observe if that will make a difference. Make sure that your new password is not so similar to what you currently have.

ooo I haven't started on this yet but thanks for the info so I can watch out for it when I do.

Were they Interactive Boards? I know a few groups I'm in have boards set up where anyone invited to the board can post to it. The creator just needs to go in and add people to the Interactive Board.

I may have been someone got your password from another website. If you use the same password everywhere this could be the problem.

Hi Tiff.

This happened to me as well but I tried a little something that seems to have worked. Had spammy boards popping up all over but they did not realize that with them came the emails announcements.
So I created a board specifically for those spammers and described it as "designed to promote Pinterest spam...spam my account and I'll post your name to the board..."make my day".
Interesting that nobody took me up on it - no more Pinterest spam boards showing up.

Di

Tiff - same thing happened to me. About five boards with just one pin in one of them.

I changed my psw pronto and no problems since.

James

Just went over and noticed a new board on my account that
I didn't create

Willie

I trust that since Pinterest picked up steam, hackers began locking themselves into their dungeons and worked overtime without sleep in order to program their criminal bots to worm their way into the backdoor and create all kinds of havoc for others, and possibly profits for them.

pinterest????? never know it before.......
i will tried it maybe....

This is really weird O.o I haven't noticed any boards that I didn't post in my account so far, but I'll be looking out for that. Hope they find a way to prevent that soon, it could get out of hand if more people spam like that.

I had a very similar thing happen to me on facebook, where I would randomly have new friends/followers. I just changed the password, did that seem to work for you?

Wow! Just checked mine but it appears it hasn't been hacked.

I'm surprised how widespread this problem is, Pinterest surely must know about it.

James Scholes

i hope pinterest fix this issues
so many scammer and fake account

Well Jeez, yesterday I got two emails saying Tonia Carruth and Gena Torba "liked" my pin on i love working from home. Thing is, even though I picked up a pinterest account, I have not done a thing with it - no boards, no pinning, nothing.

I did go look at the board (It's the only thing there) and then when I looked at Tonia's activity I can see everything there is the same kind of affiliate spammy junk.

But someone here also mentioned Facebook, and that reminded me that when I was looking at my timeline yesterday, even before I noticed the emails, there were two posts saying that I liked i love working from home.

At the time I didn't know where they came from so I deleted them and marked one as spam. That brought up the question box asking me if I wanted to de-authorize ping.fm from posting to my account. Since I don't remember giving them authorization - and I'm pretty careful about that kind of thing- I made sure it was turned off. I then posted an apology to my followers.

So now I'm thinking it might be useful to check out the connection with ping.fm

BTW the person who I supposed pinned from is Chelsea Fallon-Hammond. Her profile, activities and pins look almost exactly like Tonia's.

It hasn't happened to me, but I belong to a Pinterest group on facebook and someone there said she had 4 new boards that were all money related. She said all the boards were empty and she deleted them. Someone on there said if it's a group board it will show up but will ask if you want to join & you can accept or decline. The facebook group is called Pinterest Addict.

Thank you soooooo much for the heads-up Tiffany! I was just getting ready to take it up a notch there so I'll be on the lookout for sure.

Fortunately for me I have not had any dubious activity which I guess tells me I don't do Pinterest enough! The link below is useful for anyone who does not pay for roboform.

https://secure.pctools.com/guides/pa...word_generator

I had someone in my Pinterest Facebook group mention that his account got hacked this week. When I did a search online about it, I noticed that people started mentioning this particular hack a few months ago, but there was no information on what was really going on with it.

It seems like Pinterest itself has been breached somehow. I guess time will tell what's really going on behind the scenes with this... There have been so many data breaches of late... (LinkedIn, eHarmony, Last.fm, Global Payments, etc.), there's no telling what Pinterest security vulnerability has been exploited by hackers.

I don't see myself abandoning Pinterest just yet - because of this particular hack - that would be like me moving out of my house, that's in a perfectly good neighborhood ... because houses get broken into. There is no perfect world... at the moment. I'm just going to take the necessary precautions and be aware and alert - like we have to do with everything else.

I set my account up and haven't touched it since, probably should do something about that

Anyway I checked it and it's just the way I left it........empty :rolleyes:

It's been happening to me for the last week. I delete them, and they come back. "I love my job" one is really really annoying.

I just made an announcement for my followers. Another strange thing is that one of the boards I've created is deleted. I can't find it anywhere.

I think it's a Pinterest attack as I keep seeing similar reports on other forums too.

I haven't spent enough time on Pinterest to know how it works, or if it works as well for traffic as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, You Tube, Stumble Upon, etc, but I can get you random Pinterest followers for five cents each, if that's what you want.

Well goodness!! I have 2 NEW people who LIKE pins I never made on boards I've never even created!!

Sarah 'Toyzan' Piazza liked your pin coolest 2012 jobs
Kathy Jones liked your pin coolest 2012 jobs

...AND that's without me DOING ANYTHING!! OMG - I think I've stumbled on what everyone else has been offering in all those emails I keep getting ... All I did was join, and I have 4 likes, and 8 boards in the "make money" niche with 4 or 5 pins!! and I NEVER HAD TO DO A SINGLE THING !!!

Tiff - This is a true "set it and forget it" system! Why didn't you let us in on this earlier???!!

ROFLMAO

Seriously - I marked one pin as spam, then marked another as other and said it was spam and then finally I marked the last one as other & said it was spam and that I had never even created a board. Then I deleted all the 8 or 9 money-making oriented boards and changed my password. Before I got rid of everything I did manage to copy down the sites the pins went to (I did put a space in front of the .com):

http://blog.fc2. com/click/?adid=1250&adurl=http://www.pinterest.com-3.be/go/?s=5u

http://wzus1.ask. com/r?t=p&u=http://www.pinterest.com-news2.be/go/?s=2u

http://wzus1.ask. com/r?t=p&u=http://www.pinterest.com-3.be/go/?s=4u

If anyone knows anything else to do (since I'm new to pinterest and I really don't know anything about how to use it yet), feel free. I've included all the accounts, etc. in this and the previous post.

BTW just noticed those are all domains from Belgium - I didn't share it with pinterest, but will see if there's a way.

Also it seems I can't get back into my space on the pinterest - it keeps trying to build the feed...

Just logged in and found a bunch of boards I didn't create and most of my boards that I did create were gone. Seems people have figured out a way to hack Pinterest. Just took me almost an hour to get it back to semi-normal.

I think your account was hacked. It will be best to change the password and contact the support notifying them.
They should be able to track the IP address.

I guess I'd better get over there and check mine. I deleted my whole account last year because of this very problem and just a few weeks ago re-subscribed. I only have one pin up and am not really into Pinterest yet (too many irons in the fire right now.) Thanks for the warning.

I don't use Pinterest but I've had accounts hacked before and I hate it when someone uses my name to post. Here are some posts I found that I thought might be helpful if you're facing this problem:

1. Here's a post from back in March detailing a hacking problem in Pinterest. Apparently there's even a photo of spam offers on a Pinterest engineer's board (Source):

2. Another post detailing the latest spam problems in July 2012, with photos of some of the offending items pinned (Source):

3. And here's a post that tells you how to know if you've been hacked and what to do about it. As has been mentioned already, changing the password appears to solve the problem (Source):

Thanks for the warning. I checked mine but found no new unwanted boards. I'm changing the password now just to be sure.

I am having the same problem, this morning I have 4 new boards that I have not added.

Hmm seems as though Pinterest has a vulnerability. Hopefully they sort it out soon.

I have the same problem. Not only have I been spammed and scammed, my favourite board, along with several dozen pins has been deleted.

I have changed my password and disconnected from Facebook and Twitter. I also managed to delete all but one of the fake boards. It has 2 pins. The work-around to delete the 2 pins and get rid of the board does not work. All I get is a 404, page can't be found. There seems to be nothing I can do to get rid of that board.

Sure hope someone comes up with a solution. Otherwise my next move will be to get rid of Pinterest. That would be a little 'heartbreak' since I have put a lot of work into it.

Having been doing work on and off in web security for the last 10 years, I've seen this with every social startup that's hit it big.

Phishers see a new community of people that don't know how easily they are preyed upon. Basically you want to use a COMPLETELY different password on ANY new social media site.

ALWAYS check the url bar on your browser before you put in any user information. Phishers CANNOT spoof that, unless they somehow got you to install their own custom made browser.

As a general rule just always be careful with your user information. Have several different passwords and usernames, especially for new social sites because they can be targets for all types of potential security breachs. It could be the case that pinterest had a serious cross site scripting vulnerability in which case, it was extremely easy for a hacker to get some passwords.

Hopefully they do get it together if it's a problem on their end, I've heard from some of my friends who have friends in the black hat world that lots of phished pinterest accounts are being sold for exactly what happened to your account.

So be safe online, and keep all those usernames and passwords to yourself!

Tiff,

Shared your frustration. The internet world is also full of Good and Evil. When there is Good, it will attract Evil. This is the Tao of Yin and Yang.

I had the same problem... Being that Pinterest is still fairly new, I think someone figured out a way to break through their security measures and post on other people's profiles...

I had to go through and delete boards too...

This was happening when I wasn't using pinterest though. I would login and see tons of new pins.

Eventually I changed my PW and I think the issue ceased after that

Give it enough time and someone will always try to figure out a way to take advantage of someone elses hard work...it may not have hurt you (Per se) but still hate to see this kind of activity.

This kind of stuff makes the rest of us look bad to the average joe!

Best of luck stopping it...for good!

Lol, scumbags!