Snapchat Hack Attack Hitting Users With Spam Photos Of Delicious, Frothy Smoothies

This is not spam. It’s an innocent smoothie. (Jeannette E. Spaghetti)

While there’s no ideal way to get spammed, and being hacked is an unpleasant experience overall, the latest attack on Snapchat looks kind of delicious. Users are reporting receiving photos of tasty smoothies with a spammy link from their friends, who are definitely not sending said drinkalicious photos.

Wired’s Joe Brown says this happened to him yesterday — where his friends were texting him to see what his deal was with sending all those smoothie photos. Thing is, he didn’t send them, he writes.

“Honest mistake; I get weird on Snapchat. But this smoothie was not mine, and I was not trying to sell discounted supplements through a fruit-themed scamsite; my Snapchat account was hacked, and I am not alone.”

Anyone who clicks on the link is just taken to an AllRecipes.com smoothie recipes, notes Business Insider, so it appears to be a relatively harmless attack. The hacker or hackers could somehow be trying to steal a chunk of referrals for that page, perhaps. Or they just really, really like smoothies.

Snapchat has confirmed this has been an ongoing problem in the last few days (probably because they’re sooo popular). It appears to be a small scale kind of thing where someone has your email address and is guessing your password, so it’s a good idea to go ahead and change that.

“It’s mostly cases where someone has your email address and password and gets in on the first try,” a spokesperson told Brown. “We’re not seeing any evidence of brute-force tactics.”

Here’s where we have to remind you not to use your password for multiple sites, and make sure it’s got all kinds of numbers, capitalized letters and punctuation in it. Oh, and don’t use “password.”

Now time to make a real smoothie, sans spam, because I’ve suddenly got a hankering. And now I can’t send anyone a photo of it when it’s done. Darn you, hackers!

A Snapchat Hack Is Sending People Pictures of Smoothies [Wired.com]

A New Snapchat Hack Sends Pictures Of Smoothies To People [BusinessInsider]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist