14 DAY TRIAL // The diet spam campaign that’s been making the rounds on Twitter for the past several weeks appears to have moved to Instagram.
The messages that make the rounds on Instagram show pictures of fruit. The pictures are accompanied by a bogus BBC News message which promotes an “exclusive offer” for a fruit diet.
In some cases, the scammers continue to trick users by claiming that the diet has been recommended by Dr. Oz.
Unfortunately, the Instagram spam run appears to be highly successful. One of the links has been clicked more than 35,000 times already.
“Earlier today a small portion of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were posted from their accounts. Our security and spam team quickly took actions to secure the accounts involved, and the posted photos are being deleted,” Facebook, which owns Instagram, has told Gigaom.
Instagram has started resetting the passwords of the impacted users.
Security expert Janne Ahlberg has been closely monitoring the evolution of the miracle diet spam campaign. Over the weekend, he reported that spam messages were spotted not only on Twitter, but on Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest as well.
The expert has told Softpedia that the Instagram campaign appears to be run by the same spammers, especially since the old Dr. Oz Show trick is utilized.
It’s worth noting that in many cases, the spammy messages are sent out from compromised accounts. However, it’s still uncertain how these accounts have been hijacked.
Ahlberg has come across Facebook and Twitter phishing websites that appear to be connected to the attack. However, the expert notes that the spammers could also be using a third-party application to achieve the task.