Pin-hacked!
You may have been one of the millions effected by GoDaddy (you know, the site where you can purchase domain names, host a site, and even use their tools to create quick and dirty websites....and the one with the infamous "GoDaddy Girls" commercials?) being hacked the other day.
I'm happy to say that my simple little site, which is hosted there, is up and running happily, no damage done. But if you hosted an eCommerce site there, for example, you might have had a loss of revenue. And sometimes, users will just not return to a site that they think is broken or no longer functional. And of course, not everybody is paying attention to the news that a popular web host is down.
Today I got a notice that someone had logged on to my Pinterest account from Indonesia. I admit to getting up in the night for a snack now and then, but I really can't imagine that I got out of bed and headed to an airport for a quick overnight flight to Indonesia just to log on to Pinterest. Clearly, I'd been hacked.
But Pinterest? It's not a commerce site, there's no credit card information or even anything significantly damning to make it an obvious target for hacking.
What the culprit was really up to was spamming my Pinterest account with a "get rich quick by working from home" scheme. Because Pinterest pins are shared with those following you, my broken-English gushing over how excited I was to have found this great way to "make monies," accompanied by a 1950's style back-of-the-comic-book art work, would have gone out to the thousands - ok, dozens - of people who wait breathlessly for my next Pin!
It wasn't so bad, at least for me. I had to change my password, and delete the spammed pins. While this wasn't particularly onerous for me as I'm not an avid Pinner, it could have been a real pain in the neck for someone who is a very active pinner, as the spurious Pin was in every board, sometimes multiple times.
I was half laughing and half shaking my head is dismay at the thought of someone in Indonesia creating a Pinbot in the hopes that someone - anyone - would be silly enough a) to click on such a silly Pin, and b) to actually take action on the idiotic offer. But as P.T. Barnum said...
I'm happy to say that my simple little site, which is hosted there, is up and running happily, no damage done. But if you hosted an eCommerce site there, for example, you might have had a loss of revenue. And sometimes, users will just not return to a site that they think is broken or no longer functional. And of course, not everybody is paying attention to the news that a popular web host is down.
Today I got a notice that someone had logged on to my Pinterest account from Indonesia. I admit to getting up in the night for a snack now and then, but I really can't imagine that I got out of bed and headed to an airport for a quick overnight flight to Indonesia just to log on to Pinterest. Clearly, I'd been hacked.
But Pinterest? It's not a commerce site, there's no credit card information or even anything significantly damning to make it an obvious target for hacking.
What the culprit was really up to was spamming my Pinterest account with a "get rich quick by working from home" scheme. Because Pinterest pins are shared with those following you, my broken-English gushing over how excited I was to have found this great way to "make monies," accompanied by a 1950's style back-of-the-comic-book art work, would have gone out to the thousands - ok, dozens - of people who wait breathlessly for my next Pin!
It wasn't so bad, at least for me. I had to change my password, and delete the spammed pins. While this wasn't particularly onerous for me as I'm not an avid Pinner, it could have been a real pain in the neck for someone who is a very active pinner, as the spurious Pin was in every board, sometimes multiple times.
I was half laughing and half shaking my head is dismay at the thought of someone in Indonesia creating a Pinbot in the hopes that someone - anyone - would be silly enough a) to click on such a silly Pin, and b) to actually take action on the idiotic offer. But as P.T. Barnum said...
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