Instagram hit by fruit spam, Facebook says affected accounts were secured quickly

instagram spam attack

Notice anything unusual about your Instagram lately? There has been some reports saying that the photo sharing service has been hit by a fruit spam. Fruit, in the sense that few photos of colourful fruit started appearing on the stream of some users.

Aside from those seemingly normal fruit photos, there was also a message about a miracle fruit diet. The photos were posted to a user’s profile and the spam changed the URL in the user’s bio. When the link is clicked, it brings the user to a BBC page, which obviously is fake. Right now, the link has been getting more than 30,000 clicks. Well, before Facebook acted upon it and I’m sure by now, the clicks have been diminished.

Responding to the report, Facebook says:

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 has not given any comment on what caused the spam attacks as of now as well as the exact figures on the number of users that were actually affected by the attacks. If you’ve been a long time Instagram user, you’d know that this is the first large-scale spam that had hit Instagram. Recently, Instagram included the ability for users to share short videos and since then, the feature has gained both positive and negative reactions from Instagram users. Does the spam attack has anything to do with Instagram video? We’d like to think that it has not but we could be wrong.

[via GigaOM]

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