14 DAY TRIAL // Spammers started to hack accounts of Snapchat users to distribute messages with clickable links pointing to websites claiming to sell miraculous diet pills.
Snapchat users were affected by spam campaigns in the past, but this time it appears that the crooks rely on the text chatting feature the company introduced in May.
Since the new feature allowed links only from friends to be clicked, spammers proceeded to compromise accounts in order to facilitate delivery of their messages.
Satnam Nanrang from Symantec reports that the URLs contain the “groupon.com” string, which is designed to trick the potential victims into believing that they would access discounted products on the Groupon website.
“The compromised Snapchat accounts send out a photo message of a box of Garcinia Cambogia, which is followed by a chat message that includes a suspicious link containing ‘groupon.com’ in the URL,” says Narang in a blog post.
Snapchat confirms that the accounts responsible for spreading advertisements to fake products have been compromised and advises users to rely on more complex and unique passwords in order to secure access to the service.
However, it appears that the credentials were obtained from the compromise of other websites. Users employing the same countersign for multiple services are particularly vulnerable and the general recommendation is to use a different password for each service the user subscribes to.