With all the attention being showered on Pinterest lately, it was inevitable that criminals would figure out a way to cash in on the popular social-media pinup site. New point-and-click software available in underground markets does just that by helping even the most technically unsophisticated people prey on the gullibility of other users.
A couple of toolkits analyzed by McAfee researcher Hardik Shah allow users to generate fraudulent referral fees from Amazon, online survey services, and premium telephone numbers. They work by redirecting unwitting Pinterest users to links they didn't intend on visiting and can be set up by changing just a few lines of code.
"Such toolkits make it very easy for scammers to start their own scam sites and become functional cybercriminals with a minimum of skills and time," Shah wrote in a blog post that detailed his findings. "They need only change a couple of simple things, such as URLs, and they are ready to go. Almost all these steps—from creating mass Pinterest accounts to mass liking, commenting, and posting—have been automated."
The tools come with "well-written documentation," he adds.
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