Instagram suffers an attack and unintentionally publishes photos of fruits

Since last June Instagram has suffered a wave of attacks on its social network This is a most curious and striking Spam attack consisting of the involuntary publication of photographs of fruits and smoothies through user accounts. Photographs that they have not taken, let alone published. All this accompanied by information and a link to find a supposed miracle fruit-based dietHowever, that link led to a unsafe page

This kind of attack, in which user accounts are hacked or stolen, apparently started in June. Thus, publications began to appear of still lifes made up of all kinds of fruits and smoothies that were advertised as the ultimate diet, urging the followers of these accounts to click on the link and participate in said diet. Something that the real users of said accounts were completely unaware of, finding themselves by surprise with those photographs published on their walls Now, a month later, this type of attack has been repeated, surprising another portion of users of this social network, although it does not seem that there has been been a numerous attack.

Instagram has confirmed both waves of attacks, stating that your Security and Spam team are already working on solving the problem and that these posts have been removed In addition, from Facebook (company that owns Instagram) they have sent individual emails with information forrenew the password of affected users by the attack. A measure that should be enough to prevent any content from being republished on your behalf. However, no information has been given about the origin of these attacks or how they managed to steal user accounts

Although the number of users affected has not yet been revealed, it seems that the attack was not massive. However, many of those affected used on the social network Twitter to make these problems known to their followers and to report that they had not published such content or were trying to make such a miraculous diet known.

This is not the first case of spam on a social networkAnd it is that they are the perfect platforms to achieve virality and attract the attention of a large number of users so that they access web pages that are not secure or loaded of . A similar case has recently been reported on the gay flirting social network Grindr, where profiles that are actually robots (managed by a computer program) incite the user to click on links making them believe that they would see their photos or videos, when in reality they accessed to pages loaded from .

Therefore, as much as possible, you must avoid accessing links of dubious origin, always making sure that thesource is reliable In the case of Instagram the links simulated accessing a page of the acquaintance British media BBC, so the safest thing to do is to ask the interlocutor and try to find out if it is a robotwith prefabricated phrases or a user who really wants to share information of interest