13 Aug 2011

A warning to tumblr folk out there

 EDIT: All links on this blog are defunct, including the one to mine, which indicates that the problem's been solved. It would also explain why I was forced to change my password a few months back ("suspicious activity).

Yesterday I saw a post on tumblr which alarmed me, I'm actually a bit shit at technical stuff, so I can't post a screen shot, but here's a link to the second version of it which appeared on my dashboard (the first was on the same tumblr and was identical). EDIT: It's been removed, which is fair enough everything considered..

If you don't want to click the link, here's the text
"i guess im legally retarded or something >:(
tell me this is fake guys please i took this twice and i got a 92 then a 96.. thats too close right :( am i stupid?
i took the test at http://myiqtcst.tumblr.com reblog or tell me through asks if you think its real / what you got! :("

Scummy ableist language aside ("retarded" is not okay), there's a few things that worry me about this.
First, although the initial URL is given so it appears to be myictest.tumblr.com using a weird looking "e") when it's actually myictcst.tumblr.com. That's pretty petty, but there's more to it than that.

Secondy, I know for a fact that the person who posted this can in fact use capital letters and apostrophes and tends to do so, they also were in the middle of posting a load of Killers spam (including urging people to vote for some thing) when this popped up in the middle, which seems a bit off to me (it's out of character).

Third, the link itself redirects to some random site of the sort which asks for your personal details and blatantly isn't an IQ test. The first site I got redirected to was some fake social networky dating site thing (I didn't stay there long enough for it to load) and the second was something about discovering deals in my area (I also didn't stay long enough to give you a proper description or for it to load, since I only clicked to confirm my suspicions of its scammyness).
Fourth, and most obviously, the post has accrued large numbers of reblogs, many of which (not all, I reblogged it to voice my suspicions, for example) use the same wording as above. Here's an example and another, and here's a third for luck. [EDIT: I can't check to see if those pages are still up (tumblr's borked on my computer) but there is a good chance that they've been deleted or the URLs are obsolete (people tend to change URL a lot)]. They also accrue incredibly quickly, showing an abnormally large degree of spread.
Finally, I actually responded to the request on anon to point out it was fake and got a gif of Brandon Flowers looking confused as a response. The first one has just been deleted, meaning that the post was probably made on a compromised account, so the people who are posting it have probably been hacked.

This is quite obviously a scam, so I advise you to not click on the link. It would appear that several people have already been hit, and quite recently at that (last night I swear it was on something like 4,000 notes, tonight it's busted past 35,000 36000 37000, so yeah) . I've not seen any warnings about this, so please spread the word, tweet, reblog (I'm cross posting this to tumblr), whatever - and if you think that you have been hit CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD. That's pretty much all the advice I can come up with to beat this thing.

Thanks for reading! /cheese

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