The Latest in IT Security

Weightloss Spam Hogs Celebrity Tags on Tumblr

20
Jun
2012

Users of Tumblr should be aware that numerous celebrity tags are currently being targeted with multiple spamposts promoting something called “raspberry ketone” weightloss supplements.

We initially spotted it on the Keira Knightley tag, and every random celeb search after that revealed the same spam. So far, we’ve seen it on the following tags:

Keira Knightley, Shakira, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Madonna, Anne Hathaway and Kim Kardashian.

Example:

Click to Enlarge

As you can see, each image in the above Keira Knightley tag are themselves tagged with further celebrities to spread the spam still further – in the above shot, Linda Hamilton, Kate Beckinsdale, Kerry Katona, Laura Prepon and Jennifer Connelly to name but a few are included in the spampile. Clicking on the Linda Hamilton tag reveals more spam which then seeds yet more tags with the same content, such as Danielle Lloyd, Jessica Alba and on it goes.

The spam accounts themselves are made up of a random first name and end with numbers (for example, nancy57559(dot)tumblr(dot)com) and are making quite a lot of spam posts right now – we looked at three random accounts, and between them they’d posted up 49 pieces of spam in the last hour leading to the weightloss site (12, 16 and 21 respectively). Given that there are 19 spam accounts alone in the first 3 pages of the Keira tag, that’s a whole lot of posting going on.

As for the site itself, assuming you live in the geographic region being targeted by the advert you’ll see this:

Click to Enlarge

On the bright side: it’s not Malware. On the not so bright side: you’ll have to avoid humorous gifs of Lady GaGa doing something silly for the next few hours. For the curious, you can see those clickthroughs add up in realtime on the Bit.ly statistics page (200 clicks in the last hour!)

Christopher Boyd

Leave a reply


Categories

FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2024
WHITE PAPERS

Mission-Critical Broadband – Why Governments Should Partner with Commercial Operators:
Many governments embrace mobile network operator (MNO) networks as ...

ARA at Scale: How to Choose a Solution That Grows With Your Needs:
Application release automation (ARA) tools enable best practices in...

The Multi-Model Database:
Part of the “new normal” where data and cloud applications are ...

Featured

Archives

Latest Comments